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THE BROSS LIBRARY 

VOLUME VIII 



THE BROSS LIBRARY 

The Problem of the Old Testament, by 

James Orr, D.D. (Bross Prize, 1905,) 

The Mythical Interpretation of the Gos- 
pels, by Thomas James Thorburn, D.D., 
LL.D. (Bross Prize, 19 15.) 

Faith Justified by Progress, by H. W. 

Wright, Ph.D. 

The Will to Freedom, or the Gospel of 
Nietzsche and the Gospel of Christ, by 

John Neville Figgis, D.D., Litt.D. 

The Bible: Its Origin and Nature, by 

Marcus Dods, D.D. 

The Bible of Nature, by J. Ar thur Thom- 
son, M.A. 

The Religions of Modern Syria and Pales- 
tine, by Frederick Jones Bliss, Ph.D. 

The Sources of Religious Insight, by JosiAH 
Royge, Ph.D., LL.D. 



THE BROSS LECTURES . . 1915 

THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

OR 

THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE AND 
THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST 

BEING THE BROSS LECTURES DELIVERED IN 
LAKE FOREST COLLEGE, ILLINOIS 

BY 

JOHN NEVILLE FIGGIS, D.D., Litt.D. 

OF THE COMMUNITY OF THE RESURRECTION 
■ONQRARY FELLOW OF S. CATHARINE'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1917 



>% 



Copyright, 1917, by 
THE TRUSTEES OF LAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY 

Published April, 1917 



MAY 3! 1917 




^S 



©CLA482753 

T-t-o I 



TO 
JOHN ERIC SIDNEY GREEN 



THE BROSS FOUNDATION 

The Bross Library is an outgrowth of 
a fund established in 1879 by the late Wil- 
liam Bross, lieutenant-governor of Illinois 
from 1866 to 1870. Desiring some memo- 
rial of his son, Nathaniel Bross, who died 
in 1856, Mr. Bross entered into an agree- 
ment with the "trustees of Lake Forest 
University," whereby there was finally 
transferred to them the sum of forty thou- 
sand dollars, the income of which was to 
accumulate in perpetuity for successive 
periods of ten years, the accumulation of 
one decade to be spent in the following 
decade, for the purpose of stimulating 
the best books or treatises "on the con- 
nection, relation, and mutual bearing of 
any practical science, the history of our 
race, or the facts in any department of 
knowledge, with and upon the Christian 
Religion." The object of the donor was 



viii THE BROSS FOUNDATION 

to "call out the best efforts of the highest 
talent and the ripest scholarship of the 
world to illustrate from science, or from 
any department of knowledge, and to 
demonstrate the divine origin and the 
authority of the Christian scriptures; and, 
further, to show how both science and 
revelation coincide and prove the exis- 
tence, the providence, or any or all of the 
attributes of the only living and true God, 
'infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his 
being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, 
goodness, and truth.'" 

The gift contemplated in the original 
agreement of 1879 was finally consum- 
mated in 1890. The first decade of the 
accumulation of interest having closed in 
1900, the trustees of the Bross Fund be- 
gan at this time to carry out the provi- 
sions of the deed of gift. It was deter- 
mined to give the general title of "The 
Bross Library" to the series of books pur- 
chased and published with the proceeds of 
the Bross Fund. In accordance with the 



THE BROSS FOUNDATION ix 

express wish of the donor, that the "Evi- 
dences of Christianity" of his "very dear 
friend and teacher, Mark Hopkins, D.D.," 
be purchased and "ever numbered and 
known as No. 1 of the series," the trustees 
secured the copyright of this work, which 
has been republished in a presentation 
edition as Volume I of the Bross Library. 

The trust agreement prescribed two 
methods by which the production of books 
and treatises of the nature contemplated 
by the donor was to be stimulated: 

1. The trustees were empowered to offer 
one or more prizes during each decade, 
the competition for which was to be thrown 
open to "the scientific men, the Christian 
philosophers, and historians of all nations." 
In accordance with this provision, a prize 
of six thousand dollars was offered in 1902 
for the best book fulfilling the conditions 
of the deed of gift, the competing manu- 
scripts to be presented on or before June 
1, 1905. The prize was awarded to the 
late Reverend James Orr, D.D., professor 



x THE BROSS FOUNDATION 

of apologetics and systematic theology in 
the United Free Church College, Glasgow, 
for his treatise on "The Problem of the 
Old Testament," which was published in 
1906 as Volume III of the Bross Library. 

The second decennial prize of six thou- 
sand dollars was offered in 1913, the com- 
peting manuscripts to be submitted by 
January 1, 1915. The judges were Presi- 
dent William Douglas Mackenzie, of Hart- 
ford Theological Seminary; Professor 
Rufus M. Jones, of Haverford College; 
and Professor Benjamin L. Hobson, of 
McCormick Theological Seminary. The 
prize was awarded by the judges to a 
manuscript entitled "The Mythical In- 
terpretation of the Gospels," whose author 
proved to be the Reverend Thomas James 
Thorburn, D.D., LL.D., St. Helen's Down, 
Hastings, England. This essay has been 
issued as Volume VII of the Bross Li- 
brary. 

The next Bross Prize will be offered 
about 1925, and will be announced in due 



THE BROSS FOUNDATION xi 

time by the trustees of Lake Forest Uni- 
versity. 

2. The trustees were also empowered to 
"select and designate any particular scien- 
tific man or Christian philosopher and the 
subject on which he shall write," and to 
"agree with him as to the sum he shall 
receive for the book or treatise to be writ- 
ten." Under this provision the trustees 
have, from time to time, invited eminent 
scholars to deliver courses of lectures be- 
fore Lake Forest College, such courses to 
be subsequently published as volumes in 
the Bross Library. The first course of 
lectures, on "Obligatory Morality," was 
delivered in May, 1903, by the Reverend 
Francis Landey Patton, D.D., LL.D., presi- 
dent of Princeton Theological Seminary. 
The copyright of the lectures is now the 
property of the trustees of the Bross Fund. 
The second course of lectures, on "The 
Bible: Its Origin and Nature," was de- 
livered in May, 1904, by the late Reverend 
Marcus Dods, D.D., professor of exeget- 



xii THE BROSS FOUNDATION 

ical theology in New College, Edinburgh. 
These lectures were published in 1905 as 
Volume II of the Bross Library. The 
third course of lectures, on "The Bible 
of Nature," was delivered in September 
and October, 1907, by J. Arthur Thomson, 
M.A., regius professor of natural history 
in the University of Aberdeen. These 
lectures were published in 1908 as Volume 
IV of the Bross Library. The fourth 
course of lectures, on "The Religions of 
Modern Syria and Palestine," was de- 
livered in November and December, 1908, 
by Frederick Jones Bliss, Ph.D., of Beirut, 
Syria. These lectures were published in 
1912 as Volume V of the Bross Library. 
The fifth course of lectures, on "The 
Sources of Religious Insight," was de- 
livered in November, 1911, by Professor 
Josiah Royce, Ph.D., of Harvard Univer- 
sity. These lectures were published in 
1912 as Volume VI of the Bross Library. 
The sixth course of lectures, on "The Will 
to Freedom, or the Gospel of Nietzsche and 



THE BROSS FOUNDATION xiii 

the Gospel of Christ," was delivered in 
May, 1915, by the Reverend John Neville 
Figgis, D.D., Litt.D., of the House of the 
Resurrection, Mirfield, England. These 
lectures are presented in this volume. 
John Scholte Nollen, 
President of Lake Forest College. 

Lake Fobest, Illinois, 
June, 1916. 



PREFACE 

These lectures were delivered at Lake 
Forest College in May, 1915. Since then 
I have rewritten the text and added many 
notes. Even so, this book is not a com- 
plete treatment of Nietzsche. So much 
has been written about him that that may 
not seem needful. 

I would beg the reader to bear in mind 
this fact: The author's interest in Nietzsche 
is not due to the war, nor does it date 
from 1914. To what extent Nietzsche is a 
creator as well as a prophet of the mod- 
ern German mind I have not discussed. 
Speaking in a neutral country, I could not 
do that. Nor do I propose to discuss it 
now. The reader will find much help 
from Mr. Santayana's brilliant and witty 
work on Egotism in German Philosophy. 
This I had not read until these lectures 



xvi PREFACE 

were in print. I am glad to find that Mr. 
Santayana in no way identifies the views of 
Nietzsche and Max Stirner. On the grounds 
given in the fourth lecture and elsewhere, 
I cannot agree with Doctor Rashdall in 
Conscience and Christ, who treats the doc- 
trine of Nietzsche as an ethic of pure self- 
ishness. For the same reason I think the 
refutation of what he quotes from Mr. 
Moore inadequate. Both statements would 
be correct as applied to Max Stirner. 
Nietzsche did not teach egotism, but the 
sacrifice of immediate desire to an ideal of 
nobility. This may not prevent the fact 
that many of his self-styled disciples preach 
the baser doctrine. That was true also of 
Epicurus. 

On one other point misconception has 
been caused. Nietzsche disliked Germans, 
and was opposed to the doctrine of 
"Deutschland iiber Alles." This fact has 
been employed in an incorrect argument 
by certain followers of Nietzsche in this 
country. Their zeal for their master is 



PREFACE xvii 

greater than their discernment. They write 
as though the anti-Prussian sympathies of 
Nietzsche's later years are conclusive evi- 
dence that modern Germany was not influ- 
enced by him. This is to throw dust in 
the eyes of the public. Nietzsche disliked 
Treitschke, yet each may have contributed 
to the same result. Bernhardi heads his 
book with a tag "from the master." Last 
year a German pamphlet was published 
proving that Hindenburg expressed all that 
was vital in the idea of the Superman. I 
do not say that the author is right. Yet 
he would not have written as he did, were 
not Nietzsche a power in his nation. Long 
before the war I heard it said that what 
was driving the Germans to war was Nietz- 
scheanism. The irrelevance of Nietzsche's 
personal liking to the topic of his influence 
on German ideals is best stated in the 
preface to Doctor Stewart's book on the 
subject. The dependence of Nietzsche on 
German thought and his place in "the suc- 
cession" are developed by Mr. Santayana. 



xviii PREFACE 

Without subscribing to all that either 
writer says, I can refer the inquirer to these 
two books, both of them interesting, though 
very different. 

The text, so far as possible, is untainted. 
I owe thanks to the publishers for per- 
mission to use the excellent English trans- 
lations. Nietzsche's letters and post- 
humous works are too little known in 
this country. I have, therefore, made 
considerable citations from them in the 
"notes." They elucidate the argument of 
my lectures better than his full-dress works. 

The preparation and delivery of this 
course was a joy to me. To the authori- 
ties of Lake Forest College and to many 
friends there I here render my thanks for 
their great kindness, and for the high 
honour they have done me. 

To the Reverend Hubert Northcote 
thanks are also due. He has been through 
all the proofs, and saved me from many 
' errors. 

Mirfield, November 27, 1916. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. Friedrich Nietzsche: The Man . 1 

II. The Gospel of Nietzsche .... 58 

III. Nietzsche and Christianity . . . 102 

IV. Nietzsche's Originality .... 159 

V. The Charm of Nietzsche .... 213 

VI. The Danger and the Significance of 

Nietzsche 266 

Index 317 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 

It is related of Archbishop Benson that 
when he first made acquaintance with Lon- 
don society he asked in his bewilderment: 
"What do these people believe?" If he 
were alive to-day he would suffer a like 
astonishment, but his question would rather 
take the form: "What don't these people 
believe?" So strange is the welter of 
creeds and sects, of religions and irrelig- 
ions, moralists and immoralists, mystics, 
rationalists, and realists, and even Chris- 
tians, that it is hard to guess what nos- 
trum may be dominant with your next- 
door neighbour. It may be a dietetic 
evangel, it may be an atheistic apocalypse. 
One phenomenon, not the least notable of 
our day, is the rejection by large numbers of 

all the values, which even in the broadest 

l 



2 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

sense could be called Christian. It is not 
of Christianity as a creed, but Christianity 
as a way that I speak. Christianity in- 
volves many other elements, but it is, as we 
observe it, a way of life. It selects and sets 
its value on certain kinds of character. It 
is the most developed, though by no means 
the only form of the philosophy of Love. 
We now know that it gathered up into itself 
many tendencies at work in systems pre- 
viously existing. The words Homo sum, 
humani nihil a me alienum puto were written 
by a Pagan playwright a century and a half 
before the foundation of Christianity. Yet 
they found their full significance therein, 
and were, like many presuppositions of the 
great Roman jurists, ultimately destructive 
of the slave-basis of the ancient world. 
Many of these Christian values, at least the 
stress laid on common fellowship and un- 
selfishness, are preserved, with what degree 
of legitimacy we need not inquire, by many 
who reject the Christian faith. The Re- 
ligion of Humanity as set forth by Auguste 



FRDSDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 3 

Comte is agnostic in its attitude to the 
other world, but its conception of duty as 
between man and man is not very different 
from the Christian. Adam Smith wrote a 
book, less famous than the Wealth of Na- 
tions, designed to show the origin of all 
morality in sympathy. Modern altruism in 
its varied forms may be traced not obscurely 
to Christian influence, although even ethi- 
cally it is not identical therewith. 

A short while back it was assumed that, 
apart from all questions of the supernatural, 
the Christian ideal was the highest known 
to man. John Stuart Mill declared in his 
Essays on Religion that we have no better 
criterion of conduct than that of living so 
that Christ should approve our lives. So 
long as that represented anything like a 
general sentiment it was possible to main- 
tain that the wide-spread attack on Chris- 
tian dogma need have no effect on morals. 
If such a charge was made by Christians it 
was hotly resented. Men like Huxley or 
Matthew Arnold would have scorned as 



4 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

narrow-minded any one who had said that 
by knocking the bottom out of faith in the 
supernatural they were undermining mo- 
rality. When Tennyson did say it, in "The 
Promise of May," the late Lord Queens- 
berry protested at the first night and made 
a scene at the Globe Theatre. 

Nous avons change tout cela. On all hands 
we hear preached a revival of Paganism. 
Christianity as an ethical ideal is con- 
temned. Formerly Christians were charged 
with hypocrisy because they fell short of 
the ideal. The charge was false, although 
the fact was true. We do fail, fail miser- 
ably, to come up to our ideal, and always 
shall, so long as it remains an ideal. Now- 
adays the Christian is attacked not because 
he fails, but in so far as he succeeds. Our 
Lord himself is scorned, not because he is 
not the revealer of Love, but because he is. 
Hardly a single specifically Christian value 
is left as it was. These attacks come from 
many angles. In these lectures on the foun- 
dation of Governor Bross I am to invite 



FREEDBICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 5 

your attention to one such assailant. Re- 
cently the name of Friedrich Nietzsche has 
become widely known. For some years a 
cult of him, almost like a religion, has been 
proceeding. It is nearly twenty years ago 
since his danger and his charm became clear 
to me. For long, indeed, he was ignored 
by official representatives either of apology 
or philosophy. Now, however, his name is 
so commonly familiar, that your complaint 
is like to be of the other order. So I must 
crave your pardon if the topic seems trite. 
At least it is germane to the scheme of the 
Governor Bross Lectures, as propounded. 

This poet-prophet, so strange and beauti- 
ful, has laid a spell on many in our time. 
It may not be aimless toil to try to give 
some notion of what he wanted; and in the 
light of that blazing criticism to see how it 
stands with Christianity, as a house of life 
for men. The task is not easy. Nietzsche 
made a virtue of inconsistency, and never 
continued in one stay. Any presentment of 



6 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

him may be pronounced unfair by an ad- 
mirer. Moreover, the critic may even find 
chapter and verse for his complaint; since 
Nietzsche expressed most opinions during 
the course of his life. Even of his later 
Zarathustra period it is not easy to make 
a harmony. Probably no two people to the 
end of time will be in precise agreement as 
to the significance of the Ubermensch. 1 

For Christians yet another difficulty 
arises. One is tempted to give up all effort 
to understand a writer, of whom a passage 
like the following is typical: 

"The Christian Church is to me the 
greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it 
has had the will to the ultimate corrup- 
tion that is possible. The Christian 
Church has left nothing untouched with 
its depravity, it has made a worthlessness 
out of every value, a He out of every 
truth, a baseness of soul out of every 
straightforwardness." 2 

1 One writer, Belart, traces eight varieties in Nietzsche's own 
work. 

2 Antichrist, § 62. 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 7 

Nietzsche put Voltaire's name at the head 
of one book — Human, All Too Human — 
and concludes his Ecce Homo with the 
words Ecrasez Vinjame. Yet we cannot 
withstand Nietzsche unless we take the 
trouble to understand him. Besides he is 
worth it. True, madness overcame him 
before he was forty-five. On this account 
some would dismiss him without more ado 
and say that his books are all ravings. 
But this would not be wise. Even if we 
do not like him, we cannot deny him an 
influence — in some ways an increasing in- 
fluence. I think, indeed, that they are 
wrong who deny all traces of insanity in his 
writings. Doubtless, too, had Nietzsche 
fought on the Christian side, this insanity 
would be deemed good ground for neglect- 
ing his apologetic — even by those same 
superior persons who are all for treating it 
as irrelevant now. Still, there must be 
something of importance in a writer who is 
having so profound an influence on the cul- 
tivated world. We must take account of 
him, whether we like it or not. Nietzsche 



8 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

knew this. He said in one of his letters 
that the world might attack or despise, but 
could not ignore him. 

Besides, he had a way with him. Bitter 
though he be, violent, one-sided, blasphe- 
mous, perverse, vain, he never commits the 
unpardonable sin — he is never dull. The 
thousand and one facets in which flashes 
the jewel of his mind throw light and colour 
on many dark paths. The passion of his 
flaming soul, his sincerity, his sense of 
beauty, his eloquence, the courage of his 
struggles with ill health, the pathos of that 
lonely soul craving for sympathy, his deep 
psychological insight and sense of pro- 
phetic mission — all these give him a spell 
which is hard to resist. His teaching in 
some respects, not all, we may deplore. 
His picture of our holy religion is a carica- 
ture with hardly an element of likeness. 
His system, so far as he has a system, may 
seem childish. Yet Nietzsche remains. We 
shall always return to him; and the Alpine 
clearness of the atmosphere he breathes 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 9 

braces, like his own Engadin. His opinions 
may be what you will, but Friedrich Nietz- 
sche, the man, we love and shall go on lov- 
ing, even when he hits us hardest. He said 
himself that in controversy we should be 
severe towards opinions, but tender towards 
the individual. That may well form our 
maxim in dealing with Friedrich Nietzsche. 
Friedrich Nietzsche, indeed, we must get 
at. No thinker was ever more personal 
than Nietzsche — not even Saint Paul. 1 
He said somewhere that he felt every ex- 
perience more deeply than other men; and 
that all the theories set forth in Zarathustra 
were expressive of something in his life. 
Moreover, "Nietzsche is 'la sincerity 
meme,'" says a hostile French critic (M. 
Pallares, p. 345) . These words are the more 
noteworthy that M. Pallares leans unduly 

1 "Auch Tolstoi, auch Bjornson, auch Ibsen, Strindberg, Zola 
gingen nicht so vollig auf in ihrem Werk, waren nicht so ganz wie 
er, Entwicklung, Kampf , Flamme geworden." (Meyer, Nietzsche,, 
sein Leben und seine Werke, 688.) 

In regard to reading his book, Morgenroihe, he writes to his 
sister: "Such alles heraus, was Dir verrath, was im Grunde 
Dein Bruder am meisten braucht, am meisten nothig hat, was 
er will, und was er nicht will. Lies dazu namentlich das fiinfte 
Buch, wo vieles zwischen den Zeilen steht. Wohin alles bei mir 



10 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

to the severe in dealing with Nietzsche. 
Let us then to-day concern ourselves with 
some attempt to picture Nietzsche the man. 

Friedrich Nietzsche was born at Rocken 
in 1844. He lost his reason early in 1889 
and died in 1900. Thus, he was but a 
child at the great age of the revolutions. 
As a young man at college he saw the 
dawn of Prussian predominance in 1866. 
During the war that made the new German 
Empire he was a youthful professor at 
Basle and no longer a German subject. 
The present Kaiser had begun his reign 
just before the catastrophe which engulfed 
Nietzsche. He had Polish blood in him. 1 
This was a source of pride. He deemed 
himself the descendant of the Polish Counts 

noch strebt, ist nicht mit einem Worte zu sagen — und hatte ich 
das Wort; ich wiirde es nicht sagen. " (July, 1881. Brief e, V, 2, 
458.) 

Cf., also: "Mitnnter ist mir, ich hatte genug erlebt fur sechzig 
Jahre." (July, 1874. Briefe, V, 298.) 

And again: " Jedes Wort meines Zarathustra ist ja siegreicher 
Hohn und mehr als Hohn iiber die Ideale dieser Zeit; und fast 
hinter jedem Wort steht ein persbnliches Erlebniss, eine Selbst- 
uberwindung ersten Ranges. {Briefe, V, 540.) 

1 This affiliation has been doubted, but it seems now to be 
established. 






FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 11 

Nietzki. Two strains of purely German 
blood, that of his mother and one grand- 
mother, prevented him being as much of a 
Pole as he would have liked. Yet he was 
often pleased when on his frequent travels 
people took him for a Pole and no German. 
He described himself as coming of a long 
line of Lutheran pastors. That gave him 
his exhaustless interest in Christianity. 
He hated it too much ever to leave it alone. 
We find him apologising to his friend, 
Peter Gast, for the result of his Christian 
ancestry. 1 

Nietzsche's father was a distinguished 
Lutheran pastor, who died when the chil- 
dren were very young. Friedrich lamented 
this all his life. Frau Pastorin Nietzsche 
took the boy and girl, Friedrich and Eliza- 

1 This was in 1881. The letter is worth citing: "Mir fielein, 
lieber Freund, dass Ihnen an meinem Buche die bestandige inner- 
liche Auseinandersetzung mit dem Christenthume fremd, ja pein- 
lich sein muss; es ist aber doch das beste St tick idealen Lebens, 
welches ich wirklich kennen gelernt habe; von Kindesbeinen an 
bin ich ihm nachgegangen; in viele Winkel, und ich glaube, ich 
bin nie in meinem Herzen gegen dasselbe gemein gewesen. Zu- 
letzt bin ich der Nachkommer ganzer Geschlechter von Christ- 
lichen Geistlichen — vergeben Sie mir diese Beschranktheit." 
(Brief e, IV, 69.) s 



12 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

beth, to Naumburg. Nietzsche was only 
five years old at this time. He was brought 
up by his pious and Puritan mother amid 
a circle of relatives. The training of his 
mother was Spartan and the mitigations 
were the work of their grandmother, Frau 
Oehler. The circle was pious, eminently 
respectable, and of local importance. 
Nietzsche had a reverence for his mother 
which he never lost. When his stroke came 
in 1889 the old lady hurried to Turin, and 
insisted that she would tend him. There 
was, however, little intimacy of thought, 
and in this Friedrich missed his father's 
friendship. 1 Brother and sister were all in 
all to each other. Pleasant is the picture 
of their child life given in the earlier pages 
of her book by Frau Forster-Nietzsche. 
That biography is one of our chief means 
of understanding Nietzsche. Yet it must 
be read with caution. It is a very clever 
piece of apologetic writing. It needs to be 

1 Frau Nietzsche was a violent adversary of the Wagner con- 
nection. 






FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 13 

"checked by Nietzsche's own letters and 
other writings like that of Doctor Paul 
Deussen, his schoolfellow. 1 Naumburg was 
a small provincial town, and the circle in 
which the Nietzsche family moved was 
eminently pious. What all this meant in 
the fifties and sixties we can imagine. The 
boy disliked all vulgarity. At the local 
gymnasium he made few friends. But he 
was passionate in his attachments. He 
was an ardent scholar, and by this means 
won a place at the great institution of 
Pforta. Pforta was a place of renown or- 
ganised apparently somewhat like an Eng- 
lish public school, with the elder boys in 
authority over the younger. It prided it- 
self on moulding life as a whole, and not 
being a mere teaching place. Many of the 
most distinguished men in Germany had 
been educated there. Nietzsche's letters 
and the recollections of Doctor Deussen 
give the impression of a strenuous and in- 



1 Deussen, Erinne^ungen an Nietzsche, and also Frau Lou- 
Andreas-Salome, Nietzsche in seinen Werken. 



14 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

teresting life — with the friendships and 
quarrels of boyhood. Nietzsche had always 
a certain distinction of manner. Yet here 
and throughout his early life he was in- 
tensely human. It is an error to think of 
him as a recluse misanthrope. He was 
praised for all things, except mathematics. 
Towards the close of his time he got into 
one serious scrape, drunkenness, and his 
letters to his mother on the subject are 
touching and natural. Like other youths 
of literary tastes, he started a small essay 
club — the membership began with three — 
not all at the same school. The rules were 
elaborate and heroic. All were to send in 
essays or some other composition — music 
was included. One member elected each 
year was to act as critic. The ideal, as in 
most such cases, was too high for mortal 
schoolboys. It soon broke down. One 
story tells his courage. Round the fire the 
boys were talking of the story of Scsevola. 
One of them said he could not under- 
stand how any one could do such a thing, 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 15 

knowing what he was about. Immediately 
Nietzsche put his hand in the fire, and 
kept it there until he was pulled off by the 
monitor. Pforta left its mark on him. 
He had much esprit de corps. We can 
hardly be wrong in tracing to a memory 
of this school that passage about the need 
of a severe school at the close of The Will 
to Power. Even in his last illness he fre- 
quently spoke of the school. 1 

From Pforta he proceeded to the Uni- 
versity of Bonn. There he was not very 
happy. True, he found one professor whom 
ever after he honoured, Ritschl; and made 
at least one intimate friend. He joined the 
students' union, the Franconia, and fought 
the inevitable duel. But he did not enjoy 
undergraduate camaraderie and complained 
that many of his fellow-students were 
common. Partly because he had spent too 
much, he transferred himself to Leipzig, 

1 There seems to be no ground for supposing that Nietzsche was 
unhappy at Pforta or that he did not get on. Deussen's memoirs 
belie this view. Ther'e is a lifelike account of the "restoration 
of the status quo" after a quarrel. 



16 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

whither had gone his revered Professor 
Friedrich Wilhelm Bitschl. This great 
classical philologist was one chief intellec- 
tual influence. But the star of Schopen- 
hauer had now risen for Nietzsche. We 
hear much of his enthusiasm for the master, 
and of the value of redemptive pessimism. 1 
In Leipzig a greater intimacy began. A 
sister of Wagner was living there. Nietz- 
sche, a passionate lover of music and 
already of Wagner, was invited to meet 
the great man, who was at Leipzig incognito 
for a brief visit. Wagner took to Nietzsche 
at once. Thus began that friendship which 
was the most important personal influence 
in his life. 

After Leipzig, Nietzsche went for a year's 
service in the cavalry. Much as he loved 
reading, Nietzsche was never a mere book- 
worm. The early Nietzsche and his friend 

1 " Wer mir Schopenhauer durch Griinde widerlegen will, dem 
raune ich in's Ohr: 'Aber, lieber Mann, Weltanschauungen werden 
weder durch Logik geschaffen noch vernichtet. Ich fiihle mich 
heimisch in diesem Dunstkreis, Du in jenem. Lass mir doch 
meine eigne Nase, wie ich Dir die Deinige nicht nehmen werde.' " 
Nietzsche to Deussen. (Deussen, Erinnerungen, 40.) 

His anti-intellectualist standpoint makes itself clear thus early. 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 17 

Erwin Rohde had seemed to the others like 
young Greek gods when they came in 
flushed from a ride. Nietzsche entered 
with zest into his military life, and gives 
in his letters vivid pictures of it. Soon he 
became noted as the best rider in the regi- 
ment. Here he had a serious accident. 
The muscles of his heart were injured. Af- 
ter a time of severe illness he was discharged. 
His year of service came to an abrupt end- 
ing. 1 His health never entirely recovered. 
This event may be taken as the beginning 
of that long agony which ended with his 
madness. Eyesight, ill-cared for at school, 
would appear to have had much to do with 
his continual headaches and his subsequent 
insanity. So much is clear from what his 
sister says, but it is probably not correct 
to follow Doctor Gould in his book, Bio- 
graphic Clinics. The whole trouble is there 

1 "Sie glauben, lieber Freund, es nicht was fur ein tjberschuss 
von Leiden mir das Leben abgeworfen hat in alien Zeiten von 
friiher Kindheit an. Aber ich bin ein Soldat; und dieser Soldat 
ist zu guter Letzt noch der Vater Zarathustras geworden!" 
The impressions of that year were lasting, as this passage shews. 
(Nietzsche to Peter Gast, IV, 150.) 



18 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

put down to the eyes. Every other cause is 
either denied or minimised. 

In the year 1866 we find Nietzsche 
warmly patriotic and German in his sym- 
pathies, high in the praise of Bismarck and 
the government. This time at least he 
was pro-Prussian. 1 

Not long after, when Nietzsche was back 
at Leipzig studying for his doctorate, his 
old preceptor, who had early discerned 
his merit, secured him a post at Basle as 
Professor Extraordinary of Philology. 
Nietzsche was only twenty-five, and al- 
though he said he would have preferred 
to wait, signs of this are not obvious in 
the hilarious, mystifying letters he wrote 
to his sister, just before the announcement. 

1 See his letter to Freiherr von Gersdorff (Brief e, I, 17) . " Aber 
stolz miissen wir sein eine solche Armee zu haben, ja sogar — hor- 
ribile dictu — eine solche Regierung zu besitzen, die das nationale 
Programm nicht bloss auf dem Papier hat, sondera mit der gross- 
ten Energie, mit ungeheurem Aufwand an Geld und Blut, sogar 
gegemiber dem franzosischen grossen Versueher Louis le diable 
aufrecht erhalt. . . . 

"Ein Krieg gegen Frankreich muss ja eine Gesinnungseinheit in 
Deutschland hervorrufen; und wenn die Bevolkerungen eins sind 
dann mag sich Herr von Beust sammt alien mittelstaatlichen Fiir- 
sten einbalsamiren lassen. Denn ihre Zeit ist vorbei." 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 19 

Nietzsche was well aware of what he owed 
to Ritschl, and the correspondence between 
the two is a model for an intimacy between 
the pupil and the tutor, when the former 
grows up and breaks away, as he must. 
It is an error to think of Nietzsche as a 
disagreeable rebel without reverence. His 
life was spent in enthusiasms, which he 
afterwards outgrew. No man ever lived 
who felt more the need of worship. That 
is part of the tragedy of his career. Hav- 
ing given up God, he spent the rest of his 
existence in making idols and then break- 
ing them — Schopenhauer, Wagner, and the 
rest— till he settled down at last to the 
Ubermensch and the Eternal return. Al- 
ways naif — he was the antithesis of Henri 
Beyle (Stendhal), his great admiration — he 
was earnest and almost boyish in his en- 
thusiasms. Later he found the feet of clay 
in his idol, and turned in fury to smash it, 
crying out against himself and his former 
god, and the imiverse, because he had al- 
lowed himself to be deceived. But he was 



20 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

not irreverent by nature. That is a super- 
ficial interpretation, due to Nietzsche's 
command of picturesque blasphemy. 

The Basle appointment forced him to 
give up his nationality and become Swiss. 
Hence when the Franco-Prussian War came 
in 1870 Nietzsche could offer no more 
than the care of the wounded. 1 Full of 
sympathy, he did all that he could, until 
he fell ill. This period is noteworthy, for 
Nietzsche received then the first impres- 
sions of the principle which governs his 
later teaching, the Will to Power. Busied 
with the sick, driven nearly wild with sym- 
pathy, he caught sight of a troop of Prus- 



1 The following passage shews how far removed Nietzsche was 
at this time from his later dislike of all things German: 

"Nun winken neue Pflichten; und wenn Eins uns auch im 
Frieden bleiben mag aus jenem wilden Kriegsspiel, so ist es der 
heldenmiithige und zugleich besonnene Geist den ich zu meiner 
Uberraschung gleichsam als eine schone unerwartete Entdeckung, 
in unserm Heere frisch und kraftig, in alter germanischer Gesund- 
heit gefunden habe. Darauf lasst sich bauen; wir durfen wieder 
hoffen; unsre deutsche Mission ist noch nicht vorbei. Ich bin 
muthiger als je: denn noch ist nicht Alles unter franzosisch- 
judischer Verflachung und 'Eleganz,' und unter dem gierigen 
Treiben der 'Jetzzeit' zu Grunde gegangen. Es giebt noch Tap- 
ferkeit, und zwar deutsche Tapferkeit, die etwas innerlich an- 
deres ist als der 'Elan' unserer Nachbarn." {Letters, I, 110.) 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 21 

sian horse coming thundering down a hill 
into the village. Their splendour of aspect, 
strong, courageous, and efficient, at once 
impressed him. He saw that suffering and 
sympathy with it were not, as he had 
thought a la Schopenhauer, the profound- 
est things in life. It was this power greater 
than pain which made pain irrelevant — 
that was the reality. Life began to pre- 
sent itself as a struggle for power. This is 
his first move away from Schopenhauer and 
pessimism. 

Nietzsche recovered, though not fully. 
He went back to Basle and tried to go 
through his duties before he was well. 
From this extra strain he never really re- 
covered. Yet he had much to help him. 
Basle had welcomed him with open arms. 
Quickly was he made an ordinary professor, 
with a heightened salary. As a teacher he 
had and must have had enthusiastic pupils 
— they never had a better teacher, it was 
said. Friends were not lacking. True, 
Nietzsche was greatly bored by general 



22 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

society, and found himself, as an eligible 
bachelor, more pushed against than push- 
ing. Gradually he withdrew, and fre- 
quented only his chosen circle — Fischer and 
Overbeck, the historical theologian, who was 
later on to hurry to Basle on surmise of 
his illness; and Burckhardt, the great his- 
torian of the Renaissance. No man could 
complain who lived with such men and 
was loved by them. Wagner was a yet 
more potent star. Nietzsche occupied 
much of his spare time with visits to Trieb- 
schen, where Wagner and Frau Cosima 
lived. The latter is probably the only 
woman who greatly influenced Nietzsche. 
Even in later years he acknowledged his 
debt to her. To them is owing his debut 
as a writer. Nietzsche came before the 
world with the Birth of Tragedy. The book 
is really a Wagnerite tract: it starts with 
that distinction of which he afterwards 
made so much, the distinction between 
Apollinian and Dionysian art, the former se- 
rene, contemplative, intellectual; the latter 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 23 

ecstatic, emotional, compelling. The dis- 
tinction is not unlike that between classi- 
cal and romantic art, if we use the terms 
for two modes of art, not for definitely his- 
torical movements. The conclusion of the 
book points to Wagner, though it does not 
name him, as the man who is to recover the 
true tragic altitude. This was to Nietzsche 
the valuable thing in Hellenism, not the 
philosophic or Socratic development which 
already he treats as decadence. The real 
Nietzsche begins to shew himself in other 
efforts. David Strauss, the author of the 
famous Leben Jesu, had just then "taken 
the town" with his book on The Old Faith 
and the New. In this work Strauss gives 
up every vestige of supernatural faith, ac- 
cepts evolution in a materialist form, and 
tries to shew that somehow or other all 
things are for the best in the best of all 
possible worlds, if the ideals of the present 
cultivated classes remain intact, and the 
movement to secure the rights of labour be 
checked. Strauss's attitude in some re- 



24 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

spects is not unlike that of Nietzsche, who 
never could endure any attempt at improv- 
ing the status of the labourer. Nietzsche 
was in this case (as also in that of Hart- 
mann, who comes in for a share of the 
trouncing) at least as greatly irritated by 
the signs of likeness as he was by those of 
difference. In the first of the Essays Out 
of Season he fell with fury on this book, 
written, he says, solely for that contempt- 
ible product of the modern world, the cul- 
ture-Philistine, of which Strauss and von 
Hartmann were the two capital examples. 
Nietzsche's strictures are largely justified by 
the smug and banal optimism with which 
the book closes. Probably what excited 
Nietzsche's ire most would be a passage 
such as the following: 

"Ever remember that thou art human, 
not merely a natural production; ever 
remember that all others are human also, 
and with all individual differences the 
same as thou, having the same needs and 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 25 

claims as thyself; this is the sum and 
substance of morality. 

"Ever remember that thou and every- 
thing thou beholdest within and around 
thee, all that befalls thee and others is 
no disjointed fragment, no wild chaos of 
atoms or casualties, but that it all springs 
according to eternal laws, from the one 
primal source of all life, all reason, and 
all good; this is the essence of religion." 1 

Doctor Richard Meyer is hardly wrong in 
speaking of the danger of a cheap ideal of 
culture — comfort raised to a dogma. 2 This 
danger was not and is not confined to Ger- 
many. The importance of this book and 
The Birth of Tragedy is high. Nietzsche had 
now declared war on the academic scholar- 
ship of the day; he had asserted the superi- 
ority of art and philosophy to science, the 
essentially secondary position of science, 

1 The Old Faith and the New, David Frederic Strauss, II, 55. 

2 "Diese Bibel der liberalen Bourgeoisie drohte das billige Ideal 
eines gesattigten Bildungsoptimismus zum Dogma zu erheben." 
(Meyer, Nietzsche, 260.) 



26 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

needful or we could not bake our bread or 
heat our houses — but a slave in the house 
of life, as compared with its Divine Mis- 
tresses, art and philosophy and religion, so 
far as that is possible. Thus he had already 
begun his anti-intellectualist propaganda. 
Secondly, Nietzsche had shewn the hollow- 
ness of the Prussian triumph in 1870-1. 
Already he has flung his cap for French cul- 
ture, as opposed to German. Even during 
the war he had expressed himself as fearful 
of its results to Culture. Culture in the 
highest sense is the one thing Nietzsche 
cared for and strove all his life to forward. 1 
Now more than ever he begins to feel that 
Prussia is the supreme danger to Culture. 
He mocks at the Germans for their enslave- 
ment to French culture, and for their in- 
ability to produce anything of their owri. 
His great hope in Wagner, afterwards 
dashed, was just this — that he would be the 

1 See his letter home in December, 1870: 

"Fur den jetzigen deutschen Eroberungskrieg nehmen meine 
Sympathien allmahlich ab. Die Zukunft unsrer deutschen Cul- 
tur scheint mir mehr als je gefahrdet." {Briefe, V s 196.) 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 27 

herald of a new German and European 
culture-epoch. 

This essay created a sensation. It is 
significant of Nietzsche's tenderness of 
heart that a year later, when Strauss died, 
he expressed a fear lest he had caused him 
any pain. 1 Thirdly, the attitude indicated 
by the title Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen 
(Essays Out of Season) is significant. Nietz- 
sche now took up that pose which he 
never relinquished, of being the prophet, 
denouncing the evils of his day, antago- 
nistic to all its dominating currents. This 
was true only in part. Much of Nietzsche 
is, as has been pointed out, merely a trans- 
lation into his own idiom of the ideals of 
Bismarckian success. A great deal else is 
merely the last movement of the Romantic 
symphony, for greatly as Nietzsche despised 

1 Apparently the Basle folk thought Nietzsche had done Strauss 
some damage. "Gestern hat man in Ludwigsburg David Strauss 
begraben. Ich hoffe sehr dass ich ihm die letzte Lebenszeit nicht 
erschwert habe, und dass er ohne etwas von mir zu wissen ge- 
storben ist. Es greift mich etwas an." Nietzsche to Freiherr 
von Gersdorff, Briefe, I, 175. (Cf. Spitteler, Meine Beziehungen 
zu Nietzsche, 14.) 



28 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

the Romantics of the nineteenth century, 
he was himself of that company. 

High-water mark of early achievement is 
reached in his next essay — on the use and 
abuse of history. Rarely has he written 
better. Every student of history ought to 
be made to read it, lest he suffer from a 
"proud stomach." The same is true of all 
whose notion of culture is largely mingled 
with "the passion of the past." Nietzsche 
himself did not heed his own warnings suffi- 
ciently, or he would have been a less ardent 
neo-Pagan. Anyhow, his words are wise. 
He points out the danger of a culture mainly 
historical. It produces a race of epigoni, 
"pensioners on the past," always looking 
back. As he says elsewhere, the historian 
begins by looking backward, he ends by 
thinking backward. Nietzsche in this es- 
say is prophetic. More and more must 
culture look to the future, if it is to have 
any appeal. Less and less can it be made 
up of mere historical sentiment. This is 
true of every branch of culture, including 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 29 

religion. True, the wise man will not dis- 
card history, nor suppose with the vulgar 
that anything beautiful and noble in life 
can be reproduced afresh for every age. 
We get to be more not less able to enjoy 
the atmosphere of a great epoch, whether 
Elizabethan England or the France of Louis 
Quatorze. But we must beware — and espe- 
cially so if we are sensible of their attrac- 
tions — of becoming enslaved to the past, or 
choked in inherited tradition, so that we 
cannot move forward. Mere memory, even 
when lit by imagination and taste, is no 
safe guide for life — or rather it is too safe, 
and leads only down ancient lanes, when we 
ought to be seeking new stars. Christians, 
and more especially ourselves, need to take 
these warnings deeply to heart. Some of 
the worst failures are due to this excess of 
sentiment for one particular age. 

Nietzsche projected a dozen essays in this 
series. Two more were all that he wrote. 
One is entitled "Schopenhauer as Educa- 
tor," although it is mainly occupied with 



30 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

Nietzsche. The other is on Richard Wag- 
ner at Bayreuth. He had already outgrown 
the theories of these two men of genius. 
These essays were his last tribute to them 
and were personal. 

Wagner had become stronger in his reac- 
tions upon Nietzsche. The latter described 
vividly the scene at Triebschen before the 
final departure for Bayreuth. Nietzsche 
felt this removal deeply; he had been a sort 
of "tame cat" about the house, always gave 
presents to the children, went when he 
would for Christmas, and was treated al- 
most as a son of the house both by Wagner 
and his cultivated consort, the daughter of 
Liszt. This sort of intercourse perforce 
came to an end when the Wagners went to 
live so far off. Really this change coincides 
with a change on Nietzsche's part. He 
looked to Wagner to lead all good Euro- 
peans into the promised land of a new cul- 
ture. This hope grew faint. Bayreuth, 
the more Nietzsche saw of it, pleased him 
the less. Wagner became fashionable and 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 31 

things grew worse. What he wanted, 
Nietzsche said, was mere idolaters — he was 
a critic. Nietzsche wrote a pamphlet to fur- 
ther the cause of the music of the future, 
but the Wagner committee would not print 
it. Rumour said, also, that Wagner had 
said hard things of a musical piece of 
Nietzsche's, and that was a cause of sever- 
ance. 1 Wagner was surrounded more and 
more by a sort of court, and even had both 
willed it, the old easy intimacy was not pos- 
sible. Triebschen was a private home in the 
country; Bayreuth was the metropolis of 
the kingdom of culture. Bayreuth at the 
beginning had seen a small band of disci- 

1 Nietzsche, though a passionate musician, does not seem to 
have been at the pains to learn the rules. In prose he worked at 
style and knew its difficulty; not so in music. He sent one piece 
to Hans von Biilow. The reply is worth quoting, for it shews 
even so early an insight into those elements which brought the 
great mind to ruin later on: 

"Abgesehen vom psychologischen Interesse — denn in Ihrem 
musikalischen Fieberprodukte ist ein ungewohnlicher, bei aller 
Verirrung distinguirter Geist zu spiiren — hat Ihre Meditation 
vom musikalischen Standpunkte aus nur den Werth eines Ver- 
brechens in der moralischen Welt. Vom apollinischen Elemente 
habe ich keine Spur entdecken konnen, und das dionysische anlan- 
gend, habe ich, offen gestanden, mehr an den lendemain eines 
Bacchanals als an dieses selbst denken mussen." Hans von Biilow 
to Nietzsche, 1872. (Briefe, III, 2, 350.) 



32 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

pies. When it became a swell mob, and 
buzzed with the compliments of Kings and 
even the Emperor, officials, generals, the 
aristocrats and the plutocrats, all of them 
nearly as distasteful to Nietzsche as the 
democrat, it was more than an artist- 
prophet could stand. All of a sudden he 
bolted. This was the end. Nietzsche al- 
ways recognised the importance of Wagner. 
His mastery in his own line he never denied 
— only that line had ceased to approve it- 
self to Nietzsche. Even at the end of his 
working life, when he heard Parsifal, 
Nietzsche wrote to Peter Gast, saying he 
thought Wagner had never done anything 
better. Probably his statement is true, that 
the gradual adoption of at least sentimental 
reverence for Christianity was what repelled 
Nietzsche. Doctor Paneth relates that 
Nietzsche told him he realised their entire 
estrangement one day, when Wagner told 
him of his increasing admiration for the 
Eucharist. 1 Nietzsche said that his early 

1 "Dann erzahlte er mir von Richard Wagner, dem er ungemein 
nahe stand, und von dem er sich dann trennte, als jener fromm 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 33 

discipleship was due to this belief, that Wag- 
ner was a great anti-Christian force; and 
that "we Germans" are no use without a 
good stock of infidel scorn. 1 But Nietzsche 
himself had changed. In the early days of 
their intimacy he was an enthusiastic fol- 
lower of Schopenhauer, and he regarded 
Wagner as the musical exponent of redemp- 
tive pessimism. Nietzsche broke more and 
more away from this and finally rejected it. 
It is not quite easy to determine how far 
the Wagner quarrel was a cause, and how 
far a consequence, of this change. Prob- 
ably it was both. Nietzsche told his sister 
it had taken him six years of agony to over- 



wurde, und einmal von den Entziickungen sprach in die ihn der 
Genuss des Abendmahls versetzte." (Doctor Paneth in Leben, 
II, 482, Dec., 1883.) 

1 Also Nietzsche wrote to his sister: 

"Im Gegenteil sie wird immer fanatischer, verworrener Christ- 
lieberer und verdiisterter — wie das gesammte Europa. Die Wag- 
nerei ist nur ein Einzelfall. Wie hat sich, alles gegen die Jahre 
1869-72 verandert. Damals war ich Wagnerianer wegen des 
guten Stucks Antichrist das Wagner mit seiner Kunst und Art 
vertrat. Ich bin der Enttauschteste aller Wagnerianer, denn in 
dem Augenblick wo es anstandiger als je war Heide zu sein, 
wurde Wagner Christ. Wir Deutschen (gesetzt dass wir es je 
mit ernsten Dingen ernst genommen haben) sind allesammt Spot- 
ter und Atheisten. Wagner war es auch." {Brief e, V, 777.) 



34 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

come the falsity induced by the spell of 
Wagner. He also said that Frau Wagner 
was the most cultivated woman he had ever 
met. From about 1878 the friendship be- 
came an enmity. Wagner and his friends 
wrote attacks on Nietzsche. Nietzsche 
treated Wagner as the last and worst of 
the Romanticists — a drop back into Chris- 
tianity — a corrupter and seducer — declar- 
ing him essentially an actor. Wagner is the 
Wizard in Zarathustra. Finally, he wrote 
the two pamphlets, The Case of Wagner and 
Nietzsche versus Wagner. One of these be- 
gins by exalting Bizet's Carmen as the true 
ideal for music. Considering the former re- 
lations, the tone and taste of these produc- 
tions are hardly to be excused, even by the 
approach of insanity. 1 Both were men of 
genius, both were irritable, both wanted dis- 
ciples — and a breach some time was inevi- 
table. Nietzsche said Wagner was not of 
the same rank as he. The truth is they 

1<e La seule chose impardonable sont les pamphlets de la fin." 
(Pallares, Le Cr6puscule (Tune idole, V.) 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 35 

were too big for each other. 1 Meanwhile 
the health of Nietzsche had become a seri- 
ous question. At Basle he was a stimulat- 
ing teacher and did good work. But the 
place did not suit him. Digestive troubles 
of great severity attacked him and he was 
prostrated by frequent headaches. All this 
time the sense of his mission was growing 
upon him. The difficulties with Wagner 
and the general perplexity about his eth- 
ical and philosophical standpoint reacted 
on his health. 2 His eyes could not stand 
the strain of incessant reading. Palliatives 
proved vain. He tried cures. His sister 
took up her abode and kept house for him. 
He took a long leave of absence and spent a 

1 "Ich bin damals, als ich Wagner fand, unbeschreiblich gliick- 
lich gewesen. Ich hatte so lange nach dem Menschen gesucht 
der hoher war als ich und der mich wirklich ubersah. In Wagner 
glaubte ich ihn gefunden zu haben. Es war ein Irrthum. Jetzt 
darf ich mich nicht einmal mit ihm vergleichen — ich gehore einem 
andern Rang an. Im tJbrigen habe ich meine Wagner-Schwar- 
merei theurer bezahlen miissen. . . . Habe ich nicht fast sechs 
Jahre gebraucht urn mich von diesem Schmerz zu erholen? " 
(V, 479, 1882.) 

2 "So lange ich wirklich Gelehrter war, war ich auch gesund; 
aber da kam die nervenzerruttende Musik und die metaphy- 
sische Philosophic und die Sorge um tausend Dinge, die mich 
nichts angehen." (To Malwida von Meysenbug, 550, 1872.) 



36 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

winter with his friend, Malwida von Mey- 
senbug, and two fated others, Paul Ree 
and Lou-Salome, in Sorrento. All was in 
vain. In 1879 he was forced to resign his 
chair. The University treated him very 
generously in the matter of pension. Dur- 
ing the next ten years he lived during the 
winter in the Riviera, and in the summer at 
Sils-Maria in the Engadin. The first few 
years after his resignation saw Nietzsche at 
his lowest ebb. Even to himself it seemed 
doubtful whether he would live. But he was 
resolved not to be beaten, and carried on 
a heroic contest against all weakness. The 
Joyful Wisdom was the symbol of returning 
health. From 1883 onward until the final 
collapse he was a good deal better. Gradu- 
ally he grew more and more lonely, and 
broke with all his friends except Peter Gast. 
At one time he was intimate with a Jew, 
Doctor Paul Ree, who is said to have in- 
fluenced him in the positivist direction. The 
work Human, All Too Human, written under 
that influence and marking his estrange- 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 37 

ment from Wagner, is the least attractive, 
either in style or outlook, of Nietzsche's 
works. Ree is said to have influenced this 
work, and despite the denials of Madame 
Forster-Nietzsche, he probably did. 1 Dur- 
ing this period there occurred an incident, 
which would have been ludicrous if it were 
not tragic. Malwida von Meysenbug, the 
author of the Memoirs of an Idealist, a 
woman of engaging charm and very bad 
judgment, thought to provide for this most 
fastidious of men a youthful amanuensis 
disciple. A young Russian girl of brilliant 
gifts, Fraulein Lou-Salome, was to be the 
mouthpiece and populariser of Nietzsche. 
After a few months of enthusiasm, Nietzsche 
came to see that the scheme was hopeless. 
The matter was complicated by Paul Ree, 
with whom Nietzsche very nearly fought a 
duel. It led to an estrangement of some 
length between brother and sister (for Eliza- 
beth had concealed certain facts so as to 



1 Madame Forster had no occasion to be so contemptuous. 
The book is really Nietzsche at low-water mark. 



38 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

avoid a duel) . Much paper has been wasted 
on this topic, and we need not discuss it at 
length. This much should be said. Frau 
Salome-Andreas in her book on Nietzsche is 
by no means so untrustworthy a portrait- 
painter as Frau Forster would have us be- 
lieve. On one point, the importance at- 
tached by Nietzsche to the doctrine of the 
Eternal Return, Frau Lou-Salome is de- 
monstrably right, as against the sister. 1 

This breach was short. More difficult 
was the situation created by Elizabeth 
Nietzsche's engagement and marriage. 
Nietzsche, who felt any marriage on her 
part even more deeply than Macaulay had 
done in a like case, had looked for Elizabeth 
to be always his nurse and companion. It 
was a blow to his pride when he found 
that she was betrothed, and that to an anti- 

1 Doctor Karl Bernoulli's two large volumes on Franz Overbeck 
und Friedrich Nietzsche are avowedly written to counteract in 
many respects Madame Forster-Nietzsche's Life. Into all the 
points he discusses it is not possible to enter, especially since 
owing to an action at law some of the passages have been blacked 
out. But on this Lou-Salome incident there is an important ac- 
count from the pen of Frau Overbeck. (I, 336-351.) This should 
be read, especially for its criticism of Elizabeth Nietzsche. 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 39 

Semite. The amazing bitterness of politics 
in Germany is illustrated by the fury with 
which Nietzsche, no lover of the Jews, 
treated this alliance with opinions which he 
disliked. Nietzsche allowed himself to be 
persuaded into a sort of peace, but he did 
not attend the wedding. What still more 
bewildered him was his sister's going off 
with her husband to help found a new com- 
munist colony in Paraguay. Still, he took 
a share in it later. 

Deeper and deeper grew his loneliness. 1 
At Sils-Maria he now and then met some 
one whom he liked — especially an invalid 



1 " Ach, wir Einsamen und Freien im Geist — wir sehen dass wir 
fortwahrend irgend worin anders scheinen als wir denken; wah- 
rend wir nichts als Wahrheit und Ehrlichkeit wollen, ist rings urn 
uns ein Netz von Missverstandnissen; und unser heftiges Begeh- 
ren kann es nicht verhindern, dass doch auf unserem Thun ein 
Dunst von falschen Meinungen, von Anpassung von halben 
Zugestandnissen, von schonendem Verschweigen, von irrthumlicher 
Ausdeutung liegen bleibt. Das sammelt eine Wolke von Melan- 
cholie auf unserer Stirne; denn dass das Scheinen Nothwendig- 
keit ist, hassen wir mehr als den Tod; und eine solche andauernde 
Erbitterung dariiber macht uns vulkaniseh und bedrohlich. Von 
Zeit zu Zeit rachen wir uns fur unser gewaltsames Verbergen, fur 
unsere erzwungene Zuruckhaltung. Wir kommen aus unserer 
Hohle heraus mit schrecklichen Mienen, unsere Worte und Thaten 
sind dann Explosionen, und es ist moglich, dass wir an uns selbst 
zu Grande gehen. So gefahrlich lebe ich." {Brief e, V, 309.) 



40 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

English woman. Doctor Paneth has left a 
valuable account in his letters of visits and 
talks with Nietzsche in the Riviera. Very 
early he discerned that Nietzsche worked 
always from his feelings outward. . Nietzsche 
welcomed his loneliness. Glimpses of this 
are seen again and again in Zarathustra. It 
was to him the sign and seal of his greatness. 
He declares that he cannot expect friends 
any more, for friendship is only for equals. 1 
Yet all along he resented the neglect of his 
books in Germany and the lack of disciples. 
Injured partly by sleeping drugs, Nietzsche 
became more and more difficult of ap- 
proach. When he met his old friend, Erwin 
Rohde, in Leipzig, neither was gratified. 
Later on they quarrelled finally, owing to a 

1 This was written in 1884. "Lassen sie mich nur in meiner 
Einsamkeit. 

"Es war zuletzt eine Eselei von mir mich 'unter die Menschen' 
zu begeben: ich musste es ja voraus wissen, was mir da begegnen 
wiirde. 

"Die Hauptsache aber ist die: ich habe Dinge auf meiner 
Seele, die hundertmal schwerer zu tragen sind, als La betise 
humaine. Es ist moglich, dass ich fur alle kommenden Menschen 
ein Verhangnis, das Verhangnis bin, — und es ist folglich sehr 
moglich, dass ich eines Tages stumm werde, aus Menschenliebe." 
(To Malwida von Meysenbug, Briefe, III, 611.) 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 41 

difference over the merits of Hippolyte 
Taine. Paul Deussen and his wife went to 
see him two years before the catastrophe. 
They were shocked at the change in his ap- 
pearance; Nietzsche spoke of his fears of 
what would befall him, and as they parted 
they saw the tears in his eyes. 1 All the 
while there grew in him the sense of mission. 
"I am at the summit of all moralist think- 
ing in Europe," 2 he wrote to his sister. 
His sense of Apocalyptic vision appears in 
such titles as The Dawn of Day, and domi- 
nates Zarathustra. He believes himself in- 
spired as no one has been for thousands of 
years. 

The aphoristic form which he had begun 
to adopt in Human, All Too Human, was 
doubtless an imitation of La Rochefoucauld. 

1 "Hier sprach er nochmals die diistern Ahnungen aus, welche 
sich leider so bald erfullen sollten. Als wir Abschied nahmen, 
standen ihm die Thranen in den Augen, was ich friiher nie an 
ihm gesehen hatte." (Deussen, 93, 1887.) 

2 "Glaube mir; bei mir ist jetzt die Spitze alles moralischen 
Nachdenkens und Arbeitens in Europa und noch von manchem 
Anderen. Es wird vielleicht einmal noch die Zeit kommen, wo 
auch die Adler scheu zu mir aufblicken miissen, wie auf jenem 
Bilde des heiligen Johannes, das wir als Kinder so sehr liebten." 
(Briefe, V, 469.) 



42 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

But it did not sell his books. Finally, he 
was forced to publish at his own expense, 
or even to print privately. His life was pos- 
sible only by the severest economy. From 
1883 onward come his last and most im- 
portant works. They express his conquest 
over all impeding forces, over earlier mas- 
ters, and above all over his own weakness. 
He thinks that his illness even has helped 
him, and his whole philosophy rests on the 
acceptance of what comes to man — amor 
fati. Zarathustra puts all in a poetic dra- 
matic form. The other books, The Geneal- 
ogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, The 
Case of Wagner, are to be read as commen- 
taries on Zarathustra. The same is true of 
those works which appeared after Nietzsche 
had ceased all writing. The Antichrist, Ecce 
Homo, and the Will to Power. 

Nietzsche seemed almost well. When 
better he worked with feverish haste. Signs 
of insanity are not hard to discern in his 
later works, and increasing megalomania. 
In sending Taine one of his works, he de- 






FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 43 

scribes it as the most marvellous book ever 
written, and declares in Ecce Homo, "I am 
not a man, I am dynamite." * He discovers 
Turin, and wonders why he ever spent a 
winter elsewhere. His power of boyish en- 
thusiasm grows greater, if possible. He 
went on working with appalling energy. 
What he produced in the final year and a 
half is prodigious. The last publication, 
The Case of Wagner, was his ruin. Wagner 
was dead, and his friends resented, not un- 
naturally, this ruthless attack on an old 
friend. The anti-Semites attacked him 
also. Finally, he was given to understand 
that his brother-in-law, Doctor Forster, had 
turned Elizabeth against him. This was 

1 "Diese Wochen in Turin, wo ich noch bis zum 5 Juni bleibe, 
sind mir besser gerathen als irgend welche Wochen seit Jahren, 
vor allem philosophischer. Ich habe fast jeden Tag eine, zwei 
Stunden jene Energie erreicht um meine Gesammt-Conception 
von Oben nach Unten sehen zu konnen: wo die ungeheure Vielheit 
von Problemen, wie in Relief und klar in den Linien unter mir 
ausgebreitet lag. Dazu gehort ein Maximum von Kraft, auf 
welches ich kaum mehr bei mir gehofft hatte." (N. to Brandes, 
May, 1888, III, 305.) 

"Das Buch das in Ihre Hande zu legen ich mir den Muth 
nehme, ist vielleicht das wunderlichste Buch das bisher geschrie- 
ben wurde — und in Hinsichtauf das was es vorbereitet, beinahe 
ein Stuck Schicksal." (N. to Taine, III, 204.) 



44 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

not true, but Nietzsche could not know 
that. He wrote a letter attacking his 
brother-in-law. It was not sent, but was 
found among his papers. He said that he 
was taking more and more chloral without 
being able to sleep; and would ere long take 
so much that he would lose his reason. He 
did. Shortly after this he had a stroke. 
Living in poor rooms among strangers, 
means were not taken to guard him. He 
began writing letters of which the insanity 
was patent. Fortunately Professor Over- 
beck saw what was the matter and hurried 
to Turin, just in time to save him. He had 
been found bereft of reason in the streets. 
His mother, strong-minded and tender, was 
resolved to keep him with her, but it was 
needful for him first to go to an asylum at 
Jena. He became well enough to be moved 
home, and Frau Nietzsche tended him till 
her death in 1897. It is a pathetic picture, 
the pious Christian lady, old-fashioned and 
tender, spending her last years as nurse of 
the son, who had attacked with a violence 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 45 

before unknown everything she held dear. 
It is the irony of fate that such care as he 
enjoyed had been condemned by Nietzsche f 
as a cockering up of the weak and useless. 
Madame Forster-Nietzsche had returned to 
Europe on her husband's death, and was 
able to have her brother with her at Weimar 
in 1897. He was occasionally conscious, 
and not unhappy. He died in 1900, nearly 
seventy years after the death, under condi- 
tions so different but in the same place, of 
Goethe. Now the Nietzsche- Archiv is one of 
the treasures of that city, which means 
more to culture than the millionaire-haunted 
hovels of modernity. 

Nietzsche's story is full of pathos. No 
one had deeper feelings than Nietzsche. 1 
Much of his barbarity in philosophy is due 
to his fear of falling a prey to them. All 
who met him knew him as amiable and very 
gentle, and he had a distinction in all his 
ways. He is afraid of his own tenderness. 

1 "I1 fut au fond du coeur un tendre et*un pitoyable en depit de 
ses affectations de rondeur militaire et de ses preferences martiales 
affichees." (Seillieres, 360.) 



46 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

"Never give way" is his motto. All his 
teaching is a self -conquest. He could never 
be quiet. No single view could ever hold 
him. When he has embraced a doctrine or 
a teacher, he begins at once to pass beyond. 
His loneliness is a cross, and he profits by 
it like a cross. This innate sense of mar- 
tyrdom must be the true ground of his 
signing one of his last letters — The Crucified 
One, It is not mere satire. Paul Deussen, 
who knew him from a boy, says he would 
never continue in one stay — his preference 
for becoming over being as a philosophic 
category he fulfilled all his life. 1 Nietzsche 
creates because he is ever destroying. He is 
one of those natures which always react 
against their surroundings. He was indeed 
less hostile to his own age than he supposed, 



1 "Nietzsche war und blieb eine im tiefsten Innern unruhige, 
bestandlose Natur, welche es nicht ertrug lange bei einer Sache zu 
bleiben. Sein ' Menschliches, AHzumenschliches ' nebst den ver- 
schiedenen Fortsetzungen bis zum ' Zarathustra ' hin geben ein 
deutliches Bild dieses rastlosen, qualenden Fortgetriebenwerdens, 
und ich weiss nicht ob nicht, wenn ihm Leben und Kraft ver- 
gonnt gewesen ware, die Umwertung aller Werthe eine noch- 
malige Umwertung wiirde erfahren haben." (Deussen, I, 80.) 
Cf. also Salome, 54. 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 47 

for in some ways he is but an element in the 
Romantic movement, in others a part of the 
reaction against the Revolution; and his 
Will to Power expresses in some sort the 
Bismarckian triumph; 1 and that in spite of 
himself, for Nietzsche thought the Prussians 
the supreme danger to culture. 2 But in the 
main Nietzsche's ambition was to be unzeit- 
gemasse. So far as the prevailing currents 
of society were concerned, he fulfilled it. 

He had been a pious little boy. At his 
confirmation at school he was greatly im- 
pressed. But he gave up Christianity ap- 
parently without any sense of trouble. 3 He 

1 "In both these authors [Nietzsche and Hartmann], compara- 
tively independent as they are, the one a mystical natural phi- 
losopher, the other a mystical immoralist, is reflected the all- 
dominating militarism of the new German Empire. Hartmann 
approaches on many points the German snobbish national feel- 
ing. Nietzsche is opposed to it on principle,, as he is to the states- 
man who has piled up for the Germans a new tower of Babel, a 
monster in extent of territory and power and for that reason 
called great, but something of Bismarck's spirit broods, never- 
theless, over the works of both." (Brandes, 53.) 

2 1870. "Ich halte das jetzige Preussen fur eine der Cultur 
hochst gefahrliche Macht." (Breife, I, 105.) 

"Moge vor und ganz alien die staatliche Machtentfaltung 
Deutschlands nicht mit zu erheblichen Opfern der Kultur erkauft 
werden." (N. to Ritschl, ibid., Ill, 122.) 

3 The suggestion of such trouble may be seen here: 

"Hier scheiden sich nun die Wege der Menschen; willst Du 



48 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

read as a student Strauss's Leben Jesu 1 and 
asked, if one gave up Christ, how should a 
belief in God be retained ? Religion dropped 
away from him very early. That cry, 
"God is dead! God is dead!" which rings 
through the pages of Zarathustra is the as- 
sumption of all Nietzsche's writing. Yet 
all his life was occupied with attempts to 
found a new religion. One critic declares 
his whole doctrine to rest on a kind of meta- 
physical Divinity — Power. 2 Another who 

Seelenruhe und Gliick erstehen, nun so glaube; willst Du ein Jiinger 
der Wahrheit sein, so forsche." (To his sister, Brief e, V, 114.) 

"1st es wirklich so schwer, dass alles worin man erzogen ist, 
was allmahlich sich tief eingewurzelt hat, was in den Kreisen 
der Verwandten und vieler guten Menschen als Wahrheit gilt, 
was ausserdem auch wirklich den Menschen trostet und erhebt, 
das alles einfach anzunehmen, ist das schwerer, als in Kampf mit 
Gewohnung, in der Unsicherheit des selbststandigen Gehens, 
unter haufigen Schwankungen des Gemuths, ja des Gewissens, 
oft trostlos, aber immer mit dem einigen Ziel des Wahren, des 
Schonen, des Guten neue Bahnen zu gehen?" (1865, Brief e, 
V, 113.) 

1 " Um diese Zeit war das neue Leben Jesu von Strauss erschie- 
nen. Nietzsche schaffte es sich an und ich folgte seinem Beispiele. 
In unseren Gesprachen konnte ich nicht umhin, meine Zustim- 
mung auszudriicken. Nietzsche erwiderte: 'Die Sache hat eine 
ernste Konsequenz; wenn Du Christus aufgiebst, wirst Du auch 
Gott aufgeben miissen.* " (Deussen, Erinnerungen an Friedrich 
Nietzsche, 20.) 

2 "Seine ganze Lehre beruht auf einer Art metaphysicher 
Gottheit: der Macht." (Caffi, Nietzsches Stellung zu Machia- 
vellis Lehre, 28.) 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 49 

knew him says that the history alike of his 
mind, his works, and his illness is the result 
of an effort to find in the different forms of 
apotheosis of self a substitute for the loss of 
God. 1 Nietzsche himself makes Zarathus- 
tra ask: "If there be a God, how could I 
bear not to be one? Therefore there is no 
God." Probably his early religion was 
mere sentiment and fell away almost with- 
out his knowing it. Not that his attitude 
was determined by personal bad habits. 
Nietzsche's life shewed not only great hero- 
ism in its struggle with ill health, but was, 
in its noble simplicity and poverty and un- 
wearied interest in high things, an example 
to an age sunk in vulgar money-making. 

Many causes combined in his passion of 
recoil from Christianity. These can be left 
till the topic is definitely before us. One, 
however, and not the least important, may 
be noted here: the atmosphere of Naum- 

l4 'Die Moglichkeit einen Ersatz fiir den verlorenen Gott in 
den verschiedensten Formen der Selbstvergottung zu finden, das 
ist die Geschichte seines Geistes, seiner Werke, seiner Erkran- 
kung." (Salome, 39.) 



50 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

burg. He writes to his sister, that it is his 
pet aversion, the little town and its petty in- 
terests, adding that they two did not really 
belong there. 1 Still more illuminating is a 
letter written to his mother. It was des- 
patched in a fit of irritation. Many like 
letters he would appear to have posted in 
the waste-paper basket. Presumably, it is 
a reply to something that had been said 
about religion. Nietzsche tells his mother 
he cannot stand the atmosphere; these good 
Christians, these uncles and aunts, whether 
in Naumburg or not. (Briefe, V, 534-6.) 
We can imagine the situation. The circle 
of respectable old ladies; the horror, when 
the young man from college takes a walk 
instead of going to church. The whisper- 
ings, the inquiries as to whether he reads 
Voltaire, the offer of "good books," the at- 
tempts to interest him in missions or relig- 

1<c Naumburg ist leider meine Abneigung par excellence. Die 
kleine Stadt, und gedriickte Seelen. Du und ich sind nicht Naum- 
burgisch gerathen, viel zu unabhangig und vielleicht auch zu 
leicht zufrieden, und in uns zufrieden, was diesen Raths- und 
Staatsmenschen nicht so leicht begegnet." (To his sister, Briefe, 
V, 725.) 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 51 

ious gossip — all this probably among people 
who lived as though comfort were their 
main object and had little interest in 
things beyond the local horizon. Nietz- 
sche's whole life was in reaction. His con- 
ception of Christianity was compounded 
of certain errors of Schopenhauer and the 
domestic pettiness of a small provincial 
town. He was in reaction against his 
aunts. 1 

Secondly, we find him in strong reaction 
against the conventions of the academic 
world. The narrow second-hand culture, 
priding itself on heterodoxy, the complacent 
belief that by the multiplication of research 
and professorial activities the progress of 
mankind is assured, the easy-going middle- 
class ideals of a rationalist millennium, all 
this revolted him. We see its beginning in 
the essay on Strauss; but the attitude is un- 
changed throughout his life, except in so far 

1 Perhaps this passage has a note of the same feeling: " Wer hat 
nicht seine Mutter getodtet, seine Frau verrathen, wenn es auf 
Gedanken ankommt? Man wiirde in einer artigen Einsamkeit 
leben, wenn Gedanken todten konnten." 



52 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

as he seemed partly to have receded in the 
period of Ree's influence. Because he had 
been a professor, he is thoroughly alive to 
the defects of the professorial view of the 
universe. 1 

In the same way, after submitting to the 
influence of Schopenhauer, he turned round, 
and in regard to the fundamental thesis of 
the evil of life, and of salvation through 
denial of the will to live, he became the 
strongest opponent of what he once adored. 
It is needless to point out how the same is 
true of his relations to Wagner. It is not 
really so much these adversaries whom he 
attacks, as it is himself in his former state of 
mind. Half the bitterest things in contro- 
versy are those said in all sincerity by men 
who have changed their view, and are for 
ever lashing themselves in punishment of 
their peccadilloes in opinion. It would 
have been the same with the Superman. 
Had the Superman or the ruling caste of 

1 "Keine erbarmlichere Gesellschaft giebt es, als die von Gelehr- 
ten: jene wenigen abgerechnet die militarische Geliiste im Leibe 
und Kopfe haben." (Nietzsche, Werke, XI, 249.) 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 53 

Nietzsche's prophetic dreams ever been 
made manifest to his sight, no critic would 
have been more contemptuous. Nietzsche 
would have broken his ancient idol into a 
thousand splinters. 

Nietzsche had the temper of detachment. 
His words about loneliness, as a means not 
of withdrawal from reality but of deeper im- 
mersion therein, might have been used by 
any mystic and many monks. His affinities 
were by no means what he supposed them. 
Could the two have met, Henri Beyle, with 
his real cynicism, would have repelled the 
poet-soul of Nietzsche, who tried all his lif e to 
be a cynic and could achieve only the mood 
of "the great love and the great contempt." 

Many of his inconsistencies we can under- 
stand. Very few writers but feel to some 
degree the need and the value of that lone- 
liness which was to Nietzsche at once his 
cross and his crown. Yet few men, how- 
ever much they feel the need to be by them- 
selves, but feel, like Nietzsche, the need of 
a little love in regard to their creations. 



54 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

Mere friendship without this seems some- 
thing outside. Vanity may seem the name 
for some of Nietzsche's imaginings, such as 
his desire for a few disciples, who would 
keep the rest of the world in respect. But 
there was something deeper. 

That loneliness helped Nietzsche as an 
artist. 1 Maybe without it we could not 
have his most splendid passages, or the 
mystic beauty and apocalyptic of Zara- 
thustra. As a thinker he lost by it. 
Nietzsche always seems to discern some 
truth in whatever topic he discusses. His 
psychological insight is deep and real. But 
he sees it out of proportion, and having seen 
it, he magnifies all into a unity of feeling by 
shutting off all other sides and refusing to 
listen to any criticism. Dialectic would 
have saved him. Doubtless it would not 
have altered his fundamental view, but it 

1 "Zuletzt hat mir die Krankheit den allergrossten Nutzen 
gebracht: sie hat mich herausgelost, sie hat mir den Muth zu mir 
selbst zuriickgegeben. . . . Auch bin ich, meinen Instinkten 
nach, ein tapferes Thier, selbst ein militarisches. Der lange 
Widerstand hat meinen Stolz ein wenig exasperirt." (N. to 
Brandes, Brief e, III, 302.) 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 55 

would have shewn him the limits of its ap- 
plication, and made him less attractive but 
more enduring. Nothing could be less like 
the moderation of the classics and their bal- 
ance and harmony than the febrile energy, 
always a little hectic, of the hermit of Sils- 
Maria. Nietzsche jeers at Wagner for his 
incessant expressivo. Yet nothing is more 
characteristic of his own style. 

This is but an instance of the same fact 
■ — all his ideals express disgust at his own 
character and limitations. An incurable 
Romanticist, he is all for the classics. Pro- 
foundly naturalistic in his fundamental 
view, he is for ever chafing against the 
thought, and denies materialism in favour 
of some doctrine of spirit, which he is careful 
not to define. His dislike of sympathy is 
due to his being naturally full of it and 
afraid of giving way. His adoration of 
force is partly the expression of physical 
weakness. 1 Lonely, he longed for friends, 



1 *'Malgrado le immagini e le allegorie, malgrado gli ampi oriz- 
zonti scenografici ed i crescendi delle sinf onie, il segreto di Nietz- 
sche e stato scoperto. In una parola — in una sola e piccola 






56 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

and cries out pathetically at the neglect of 
him in his native land. Even his dislike of 
the Germans is partly due to his conscious- 
ness of being one. 1 Despite all assertions to 
the contrary, some of his characteristics are 
eminently German — notably his violence of 
language. Urbanity in controversy is a 
quality of French culture. 

Rays of light came to him at the last. 
He heard that Georg Brandes at Copen- 
hagen was giving a course of lectures on 
his philosophy and that it drew crowded 



parola — sta il secreto di Nietzsche, nella parola debolezza." (II 
Crepuscolo dei Filosofi. Papini. 225.) 

1 "Toute sa vie cet Allemand pur sang s'enorgueillit de ne pas 
etre Allemand. Fils d'un pasteur de campagne prussien, il 
s'imagine qu'il descend d'une vieille famille noble polonaise du 
nom de Nietzky, alors que (sa sceur elle meme en fait la remarque) 
il n'a pas une goutte de sang polonais dans les veines; des lors son 
slavisme imaginaire devient une idee fixe et une idee-force; il 
finit par penser et agir sous 1'empire de cette idee. Le noble polo- 
nais, dit-il, avait le droit d'annuler avec son seul veto la delibe- 
ration d'une assemblee tout entiere; lui aussi heroiquement a 
tout ce qu'a decide la grande assemblee humaine il dira: veto. 
'Copernic etait Polonais et Copernic a change le systeme du 
monde.' Nietzsche renversera le systeme des idees et des va- 
leurs; il fera tourner l'humanit^ autour de ce qu'elle avait meprise 
et honnie. Chopin le Polonais ... a 'delivre la musique des 
influences tudesques '; Nietzsche delivrera la philosophic des in- 
fluences allemandes; il s'en flatte, il le croit; et il developpe en une 
direction nouvelle la philosophic de Schopenhauer." (Fouillee, 
Nietzsche et V Immoralisme, VI.) 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THE MAN 57 

audiences. One or two signs latterly at Tu- 
rin and Sils-Maria made him feel he was 
getting known. But it was too late. Dur- 
ing the last years one day he heard talk of 
books, and his face lit up. "Ah," said 
Nietzsche, "I also have written some good 
books." 

One quality he had — a terrific pride. He 
said that he was too proud to make friends, 
for none alive were of the same rank. 1 All 
loneliness of spirit easily becomes arrogance. 
This Nietzsche does not react against. 2 It 
is his constant quality. Of that pride he 
proceeded to make an ideal. In the next 
lecture I shall try to shew what it was. 

1 1885. "Ich bin viel zu stolz um je zu glauben dass ein 
Menschen mich lieben konne. Dies wiirde namlich voraussetzen 
dass er wisse wer ich bin. Ebensowenig glaube ich daran dass 
ich je Jemanden lieben werde; dies wiirde voraussetzen dass ich 
einmal — Wunder liber Wunder — einem Menschen meines Ranges 
finde." (Briefe, V, 596.) 

"Ich selbst den Stifter des Christenthums in mancher Hinsicht 
als oberflachlich empfinde." 

Cf. also: 685. His pathetic account of loneliness: "Ein 
tiefer Mensch braucht Freunde; es ware denn dass er seinen 
Gott noch hatte. Und Gott ich habe weder Gott noch Freunde." 

2 "On chercherait en vain dans l'histoire des lettres, des philo- 
sophies, voire des religions depuis les temps les plus recules, 
jusqu'a nos jours un autre exemple d'orgueuil aussi prodigieuse- 
ment ingenu, de narcissime intellectuel a ce point exalte." (Pal- 
lares, Le Crepuscule d'une idole, 125.) 



II 

THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 

Courage, mon ami, le diable est vif, might 
be taken as the motto for the Gospel ac- 
cording to Nietzsche, heralded with the 
call, Repent ye of your virtues, for the 
kingdom of earth is at hand. For it is an 
Evangel that Nietzsche sets forth with, on 
it the title marked, "the rich have the Gos- 
pel preached to them"; save that by the 
rich Nietzsche would mean rich in faculty 
and not goods. Nietzsche is no less con- 
vinced than any Moses that he is to lead 
his people into a promised land. As he 
says in Ecce Homo: 

"My life-task is to prepare for human- 
ity one supreme moment in which it can 
come to its senses, a great noon in which 
it will turn its gaze backward and for- 
ward, in which it will step from under 
the yoke of accident and of priests, and 

58 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 59 

for the first set the question of the why 
and wherefore of humanity as a whole — 
this life-task naturally follows out of the 
conviction that mankind does not get on 
the right road of its own accord. 1 

"For such a task there is requisite a 
different kind of spirits than our age is 
likely to produce; spirits strengthened by 
wars and victories; to whom conquest, 
adventure, danger, even pain have be- 
come a need; for it an accustoming to 
thin, Alpine air, to winterly wanderings, 
to ice and mountains in every sense; nay, 
even a kind of sublime maliciousness, an 
ultimate and most self-assured sprightli- 
ness of knowledge, indispensable for the 
great health: to say a bad thing in one 
word, even this great health is requisite ! 
But is just this even so much as possible 
to-day? But at some time and in a 
stronger time than this tottering, self- 
doubting age of ours he is to arise, the 
redeeming man of the great love and con- 

1 Ecce Homo, 93, I. 



60 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

tempt, the creative spirit who by his 
thronging power is ever again driven 
away from every corner and other world; 
whose loneliness is misunderstood by the 
people, as though it were a flight from 
reality, whereas it is but his sinking, 
burying, and deepening into reality, in 
order that when he rises again into light, 
he may bring home with him the redemp- 
tion of reality, its redemption from the 
curse which the old ideal has laid upon it. 
This man of the future who will redeem 
us from the old ideal, as also from that 
which had to grow out of that ideal, from 
great surfeit from the will to nothing, 
from Nihilism, this bell-stroke of noon- 
day and the great decision which restores 
freedom to the will, which restores to 
the earth its goal and to man his hope; 
this Anti- Christ and Anti-Nihilist, this 
conqueror of God and of the Nothing — 
he must come some day. . . . 

"But what say I here? Enough! 
Enough ! At this place but one thing 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 61 

befits me — silence: lest I should infringe 
on that which only one younger than I 
am, only one more futurous than I am, 
one stronger than I am is free to do — on 
that which my Zarathustra is free to do 
— Zarathustra the ungodly. . . Z' 1 

Nietzsche is an apostle preaching a new 
religion of redemption. 2 For the doctrine 
of Nietzsche, no less than that of Christ or 
of Buddha, is a doctrine of redemption and 
deliverance. Nietzsche believes that man, 
especially European man, is in evil case. 
He preaches that he must be delivered from 
this. He holds that this needs a radical 
change of nature. It is a "new creature" 
that is needed. 3 This will be reached not by 

1 The Genealogy of Morals, 121. 

2 "Tiefes, feindseliges Schweigen iiber das Christenthum im 
ganzen Buche, es ist weder apollinisch noch dionysisch; es negirt 
alle asthetischen Werthe (die einzigen Werthe die 'Die Geburth 
der Tragodie' anerkennt); es ist im tiefsten Sinne nihilistisch, 
wahrend im dionysischen Symbol die ausserste Grenze der Bejah- 
ung erreicht ist." (Leben, II, 103.) 

This is his summing up of his attitude to Christianity in the 
account he wrote later on of his first book. 

3 "Tutto quello che gli resto di energia lo speso per gridare in 
belle forti parole il suo desiderio di salute e di f orza trasformato in 
teoria redentrice e per suonare e risuonare alcuni arguti motivi 
con un sas porticcio flauto di antico saggio." (Papini, 260.) 



62 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

education or intellect, but by raising a por- 
tion of man, the ruling class, into a higher 
order of life, a new society. It is a religion, 
even more than a philosophy or even an 
ethic that Nietzsche preached. His atti- 
tude to the Universe is in one respect re- 
ligious. True, he does not in the strict 
sense believe in a universe at all, but only 
a chaos of forces. Yet his doctrine of the 
eternal recurrence makes up for this, and 
justifies a certain reverence. It is life that 
he worships; and his adoration is so whole- 
hearted, that he requires every second of 
the tale of life to be told again, like children 
who never tire. Not without justice does 
one who knew him say: 

"In Nietzsche there dwelt in continual 
warfare, side by side of one another and 
in turn tyrannising over one another, a 
musician of high talent, a thinker with a 
free orientation, a religious genius, and a 
born poet." 1 

1 Nietzsche in seinen WerJcen, 23. 

"In Nietzsche lebten in stetem Unfrieden, neben einander und 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 63 

But we must not forget that of this new 
religion the presupposition is the non- 
existence of other-worldly values. Not 
once do these occur to Nietzsche, except 
as a target for attacks. The possibility 
that they have any basis in reality he does 
not consider. Rather his whole philosophy 
starts from the attempt to make people 
think out the consequences of those denials 
which he says they have already made. It 
is no use to give up God, and yet remain in 
the prison-house of an ethical system, which 
resulted from faith in God. See what your 
denial involves, and be bold enough to carry 
it to its logical conclusion. "Thorough" is 
his motto. A passage in the Joyful Wisdom 
puts this very well: 

"Have you ever heard of the madman 
who on a bright morning lighted a lantern 
and ran to the market-place, calling out 
unceasingly: 'I seek God! I seek God!' 

sich gegenseitig tyrannisierend, em Musiker von hoher Begabung, 
ein Denker von freigeisterischer Richtung, ein religioses Genie, 
und ein geborener Dichter." (Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Wer- 
ken, Lou Andreas-Salome, II, 23.) 



64 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

As there were many people standing about 
who did not believe in God, he caused a 
great deal of amusement. 'Why is he 
lost?' said one. 'Has he strayed away 
like a child ? ' said another. \ Or does he 
keep himself hidden?' 'Is he afraid of 
us?' 'Has he taken a sea-voyage?' 
'Has he emigrated?' the people cried out 
laughingly, all in a hubbub. The insane 
man jumped into their midst and trans- 
fixed them with his glances. 'Where is 
God gone?' he called out. 'I mean to 
tell you ! We have killed him — you and I. 
We are all his murderers. But how have 
we done it ? How were we able to drink 
up the sea ? Who gave us the sponge to 
wipe away the whole horizon? WTiat did 
we do when we loosened this earth from 
its sun? Whither does it now move? 
Whither do we move? Away from all 
suns ? Do we not dash on unceasingly ? 
Backward, sideways, forward, in all di- 
rections? Is there still an above and 
below ? Do we not stray, as through in- 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 65 

finite nothingness? Does not empty 
space breathe upon us? Has it not be- 
come colder? Does not night come on 
continually, darker and darker? Shall 
we not have to light lanterns in the morn- 
ing? Do we not hear the noise of the 
grave-diggers, who are burying God? 
Do we not smell the divine putrefaction ? 
For even Gods putrefy. God is dead ! 
God remains dead ! And we have killed 
him! How shall we console ourselves, 
the most murderous of all murderers? 
The holiest and the mightiest that the 
world has hitherto possessed, has bled to 
death under our knife — who will wipe 
the blood from us? With what water 
could we cleanse ourselves? What lus- 
trums? What sacred games shall we 
have to devise ? Is not the magnitude of 
this deed too great for us ? Shall we not 
ourselves have to become Gods, merely to 
seem worthy of it. There never was a 
greater event — and on account of it, all 
who are born after us belong to a higher 



i THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

history than any history hitherto.' Here 
the madman was silent, and looked again 
at his hearers. They also were silent, and 
looked at him in surprise. At last he 
threw his lantern on the ground, so that 
it broke in pieces and was extinguished. 
'I came too early,' he then said. 'I am 
not yet at the right time. This prodig- 
ious event is still on its way, and is trav- 
elling — it has not yet reached men's ears. 
Lightning and thunder need time, the 
light of the stars needs time, deeds need 
time, even after they are done, to be seen 
and heard. This deed is as yet farther 
from them than the farthest star — and 
yet they have done it!' It is further 
stated that the madman made his way 
into different churches on the same day 
and there intoned his Requiem ceternam 
deo. When led out and called to account, 
he always gave the reply: 'What are 
these churches now, if they are not the 
tombs and monuments of God?'" 1 

1 Joyful Wisdom, 167. 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 67 

What, then, is the nature of this religion ? 
Has it no object of worship ? It has — Life. 
The yea-saying to the whole of life is the 
sum and substance of it all. Nietzsche him- 
self had suffered so much and profited by his 
suffering so deeply that he could not feel 
with Schopenhauer that existence is evil, be- 
cause of the suffering which it involves. No 
less deeply than any Christian was Nietz- 
sche persuaded that what makes life noble is 
richness of experience, and that suffering is 
irrelevant. No less than any Christian does 
he repudiate the stoic ideal of apathy. We 
are not to train ourselves to impassibility, 
but to endure and even to embrace the 
Cross, on account of the strength and beauty 
that can be won thereby. 1 Fulness of life is 

1 Nietzsche, Werke, XIII, 89, § 226: " Wer das Leiden als Argu- 
ment gegen das Leben fuhlt gilt mir als oberflachlich, mitten 
unsrer Pessimisten." 

§227: "Mit der narrischen und unbescheidnen Frage, ob in 
der Welt Lust oder Unlust iiberwiegt, stent man inmitten der 
philosophischen Dilettanterei: dergleichen sollte man sehnsttch- 
tigen Dichtern und Weibern iiberlassen." 

Ibid., XIV, 81, § 162: "Leiden verringern und sich selber dem 
Leiden (d. h. dem Leben) entziehn — das sei moralisch? Leiden 
schaffen — sich selber und Anderen — und sie zum hochsten Leben, 
dem de3 Siegers, zu befahigen — ware mein Ziel." 

Ibid., XIV, 102, § 222: "Es ist Nichts hart sein wie ein Stoiker; 



68 THE WELL TO FREEDOM 

the end, and topics of joy and suffering are 
as irrelevant; just as fatigue is irrelevant to 
an athlete or losses in battle to a com- 
mander, if victory be the one end. 1 He had 
learned to welcome all that befel him — just 
as Madame Guyon declared that whatever 
has happened to one is the Will of God after 
it has happened; or as St. Paul — "All things 
work together for good to them that love 
God." As he says in The Will to Power: 

"The kind of experimental "philosophy 
which I am living, even anticipates the 
possibility of the most fundamental Ni- 
hilism, on principle; but by this I do not 
mean that it remains standing at a nega- 
tion, at a no, or at a will to negation. It 
would rather attain to the very reverse — 

mit der Unempfindlichkeit hat man sich losgelost. Man muss 
den Gegensatz in sich haben — die zarte Empfindung und die 
Gegenmacht, nicht zu verbluten, sondern jedea Ungliick wieder 
plastisch zum Besten zu wenden." 

1 (Leben, U, 838.) "Und spater schreibt er: 'Ich habe lSngst 
bei mir beschlossen, meine eigenen Wunsche und Plane nicht 
so wichtig zu nehmen. Gelingt mir das nicht, gelingt mir jenes : 
und im Ganzen weiss ich nicht, ob ich nicht alien Misslingen so 
gut zu Dank verpflichtet bin, wie irgend welchem Gelingen. Das 
was mir Werth und Ertrag des Lebens ausmacht, liegt wo an- 
ders.' " 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 69 

to a Dionysian affirmation of the world, as 
it is, without subtraction, exception, or 
choice — it would have eternal circular 
motion : the same things, the same reason- 
ing, and the same illogical concatenation. 
The highest state to which a philosopher 
can attain: to maintain a Dionysian atti- 
tude to Life — my formula for this is amor 
fati." 1 

Nietzsche will go farther. Affirmation of 
life carried to its logical extreme means not 
only the acceptance of the moment. It in- 
volves also the desire for its recurrence, pre- 
cisely in all particularity as it took place. 
It is to recur again and again. To this 
end courage is needed. The doctrine is 
probably the expression of Nietzsche's own 
resolution in his darkest hours no less than 
in bright ones. "No, I will not give way. 
No weakness; none of your pity. It won't 
last for ever. As the schoolboy says: It 
will be all the same a hundred years hence." 

1 Will to Power, II, 412. 



70 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

Then a further access of courage. "No, I 
don't care if it does go on. I will still bear 
it, bear it if it lasts for ever; bear it if it 
repeats itself ad infinitum." Some such 
experience nightly when he had toothache 
is partly at the bottom of the Eternal Recur- 
rence. On the other side there is the more 
obvious desire for the recurrence of joyful 
moments. This is expressed in his refrain: 
"Eternity is sought by all delight." We 
have Nietzsche's own word for it, that all 
his doctrines represent experience lived and 
aflame. Courage is the one virtue which 
Nietzsche leaves untouched. His disciples 
are to have the courage of their sufferings 
and of their sins. They are to risk the 
depths that they may win the heights. Far 
from seeking serenity and the pensioned dull 
existence of the safely insured, they must 
court danger and adventure, ever driven by 
one thought, the newness of the moment 
and the self-affirmation of life. No weak 
sympathy for themselves is to deter them. 
What they need not for themselves, they 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 71 

are not to dishonour their fellows by offering 
to them. 1 "I reckon the overcoming of 
pity as noble." Life, life, and more abun- 
dant life is his cry. This is the need of 
every soul — life — not comfort nor happiness 
nor riches. Some of his words are not un- 
like those of another Master: "In the world 
ye shall have tribulation, but be of good 
cheer, I have overcome the world." Or 
again: "Blessed are ye when men shall hate 
you and persecute you and revile, and say 
all manner of things falsely against you, for 
my sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad." 2 



1 See the letter to Peter Gast on the value of Vornehmheit, IV, 
219. "In alien meinen Krankheits-Zustanden fiihle ich mit 
Schrecken, eine Art Herabziehung zu pobelhaften Schwachen, 
pobelhaften Milden, sogar pobelhaften Tugenden. 

" Vornehm ist z. B. der festgehaltene frivole Anschein mit dem 
eine stoische Harte und Selbstbezwingung maskirt wird. Vor- 
nehm ist das Langsamgehen in alien Stucken, auch das langsame 
Auge. Wir bewundern schwer. Es giebt nicht zu viel werthvol- 
ler Dinge; und diese kommen von selben und wollen zu uns." 

2 "Dass man diese Lehrefur einen frivolen Egoismus, eine Heilig- 
sprechung epikureischer Ziigellosigkeit angesehen hat, gehort zu 
den wunderlichsten Augentauschungen in der Geschichte der 
Moral. . . . 

"Nietzsche hat den Personalismus zu einem objektiven Ideal 
gemacht und ihn damit von dem eigentlichen Egoismus der immer 
auf das Subjekt zuriicksieht, aufs Entschiedenste abgetrennt. 
Der Egoismus will etwas haben, der Personalismus will etwas 
sein." (Simmel, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche, 245.) 



72 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

One of the most wholesome elements in 
Nietzsche is his contempt for the vulgar 
eudcemonism of the Manchester school, "the 
bagman's paradise" of Cobdenism, the tea- 
grocer's philosophy of Spencer, as he calls 
it. To all who know England it is strange 
to find Nietzsche identifying Benthamite 
utilitarianism with English civilisation, as 
though that were anything more than a 
particular phase. But it is true to say with 
Meyer: No philosophy was ever less eudse- 
monistic than that of Nietzsche, despite the 
fact that some have thought of him as 
teaching sheer hedonism. 1 Mere money- 
getting on the part of those who have 
enough is the ugliest of all the idols of 
human worship. Nietzsche deserves all 
honour in that he sets his face against this, 
no less than any daring Hebrew prophet. 
Not that he is justified in doing so on 
his own theory. A man struggling for 
financial triumph, say, to be a "Bun-Em- 

1 "Weniger eudamonistisch ist keine Philosophic als die 
Nietzsches, den man einen Genussphilosophen zu nennen gewagt 
hat." (Meyer, 689.) 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 73 

peror" as in Mr. London's tale, may plausi- 
bly argue that lie incarnates the will to 
power in a modern pacific and industrial 
society, and is preparing the way for the 
superman. None the less is it true that 
what revolted Nietzsche above all things 
was the millennium of the utilitarian com- 
fort-idolater, whether individualist or so- 
cialist. 

The religion of valour is no bad name for 
this side of Nietzsche's teaching. No one 
need be at pains to quarrel with his inculca- 
tion of heroism. As he says of his disciples : 

"The type of my disciples — to such 
men as concern me in any way I wish 
suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treat- 
ment, indignities of all kinds. I wish 
them to be acquainted with profound 
self-contempt, with the martyrdom of 
self-distrust, with the misery of the de- 
feated: I have no pity for them; be- 
cause I wish them to have the only thing 
which to-day proves whether a man has 



74 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

any value or not, namely, the capacity of 
sticking to his guns." x 

The ground of all this is, that the fulness 
of life is won only this way. Risk and pain 
are needful for the tempering of the steel of 
spirit. In this he preaches a doctrine pre- 
cisely similar to that of our Lord: "Whoso 
loseth his life shall save it." It is, in fact, 
the doctrine of the Cross, little as Nietzsche 
seems aware of this. 

To Nietzsche Life, development, is the 
one fact. TLdvra pel ov&kv fievet. 2 There is 
neither being nor spirit nor matter nor 
individual nor universe — all is becoming. 3 
Every conception involving substance is a 
mere illusion of language created by our 

1 Will to Power, II, p. 333, § 910. 

2 (Simmel, op. cit., 262.) "So ruht seine ganze Lehre auf dem 
dogmatischen Imperativ: das Leben soil sein." 

3 "Es giebt weder Geist, noch Vernunft, noch Denken, noch 
Bewusstsein, noch Seele, noch Wille, noch Wahrheit. Alles Fik- 
tionen die unbrauchbar sind. Es handelt sich nicht urn 'Subjekt 
und Objekt,' sondern urn eine bestimmte Thierart, welche nur 
unter einer gewissen relativen Richtigkeit, vor allem Regelmas- 
sigkeit ihrer Wahrnehmungen (so dass sie Erfahrung kapitalisieren 
kann) gedeiht. 

"Die Erkenntniss arbeitet als Werkzeug der Macht. So liegt 
es auf der Hand, dass sie wachst mit jedem Mehr von Macht." 
(II, 770.) 






THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 75 

habit of chopping up the world, so as to con- 
trol it. Strictly speaking, there is no world, 
only a perpetual flow of becoming. That 
becoming, that energy (you will at once 
recall the elan vital of M. Bergson, and the 
eternal flux of Heraclitus) — is wrongly 
conceived if it is thought of as the will 
to live. There cannot be a will to live. 
That would be supposing something ante- 
rior to life. Life is. What does it mean? 
A will for more and more and ever more; in 
other words, a will to power. This is the 
one reality. Every other picture of the 
world, every other living piece of the world, 
ourselves included, is merely a distorted 
image of this reality. As he puts it in an 
eloquent passage at the close of the Will to 
Power: 

"Do ye know what 'the universe' is to 
my mind ? Shall I show it to you in my 
mirror? This universe is a monster of 
energy, without beginning or end; a fixed 
and brazen quantity of energy which 



76 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

grows neither bigger nor smaller, which 
does not consume itself, but only alters 
its face; as a whole its bulk is immutable, 
it is a household without either losses or 
gains, but likewise without increase and 
without sources of revenue, surrounded by 
nonentity as by a frontier. It is nothing 
vague or wasteful, it does not stretch into 
infinity, but is a definite quantum of 
energy located in a limited space, and not 
in space which would be anywhere empty. 
It is rather energy everywhere, the play 
of forces and force-waves, at the same 
time one and many, agglomerating here 
and diminishing there, a sea of forces 
storming and raging in itself, for ever 
changing, for ever rolling back over incal- 
culable ages to recurrence, with an ebb 
and flow of its forms, producing the most 
complicated things out of the most simple 
structures; producing the most ardent, 
most savage, and most contradictory 
things out of the quietest, most rigid, and 
most frozen material, and then returning 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 77 

from multifariousness to uniformity, from 
the play of contradictions back into the 
delight of consonance, saying yea unto 
itself, even in this homogeneity of its 
courses and ages, for ever blessing itself as 
something which recurs for all eternity — 
a becoming which knows not satiety, or 
disgust, or weariness: this, my Dionysian 
world of eternal self-creation, of eternal 
self-destruction, this mysterious world of 
twofold voluptuousness; this, my 'Be- 
yond Good and Evil/ without aim, un- 
less there is an aim in the bliss of the cir- 
cle; without will, unless a ring must by 
nature keep good-will to itself — would 
you have a name for my world ? A solu- 
tion of all your riddles ? Do ye also want 
a light, ye most concealed, strongest, and 
most undaunted men of the blackest mid- 
night ? This world is the Will to Power 
— and nothing else ! And even ye your- 
selves are this will to power — and nothing 
besides !" 1 

1 Will to Power, tt 431, 2. 



78 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

This will to power is everything; the goal 
' and development of spirit no less than of 

matter. In truth, there is neither one nor 
the other, but only this chaos of warring 
forces, all with the one end. The will to 
power determines the "law" of gravitation, 
the process of the planets, the origin of 
species, the course of human history. It is 
the reality behind all science, all art, and all 
religion. Every act which seems to deny it 
is nothing but a mask to insure its deeper 
predominance. Since this will to power is 
the one reality, and since, also, it has no 
meaning, for there is no goal of evolution, no 
"far-off divine event." "The world is not 
an organism, it is a chaos," blind and with- 
out purpose or meaning, with neither end 
nor beginning, after passing through every 
possible combination it must ultimately re- 
peat itself. The world is thus a clock run- 
ning down, and then self-winding to an ex- 
actly similar course. > Since all this is the 
one will to power, individuality can be no 
more than an appearance of it. Individuals 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 79 

do not in any real sense exist — any more 
than they do on the system of Schopen- 
hauer. 1 Nietzsche lays stress on personal- 
ity. His object is to secure strong individ- 
uals. Yet I do not see how on his system 
they have any reality; they are the mere 
soap-bubbles blown for the nonce by the 
will to power; the superman is only the 
largest and most highly coloured soap-bub- 
ble. 

Since the will to power is all, and since 
moral value is denied to it, to talk of wrong- 
doing is absurd. All actions, after they 
have taken place, are holy. Will, however, 
which can make all things new, finds one 
obstacle. It cannot reverse the past. In 
revenge for this impotence, it invents the 
torment of evil conscience. In theory 
Nietzsche rejects all moral valuations. In 
practice he reasserts them. Otherwise there 
is no meaning in his attacks on decadence, 
and all forms of decadent ethics, whether 

1 " Egoismus ist ebenso wie 'Selbstlosigkeit' eine populare Fic- 
tion; insgleichen das 'Individuum' die 'Seele.'" (Werke, XIII, 
148.) 



80 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

philosophic pessimism like that of Schopen- 
hauer, or a religion like Christianity, or 
any formal adoption of the golden rule. 
All these in Nietzsche's view are equally 
a no-saying to life; they are a crushing of 
the will to power, a forcing down of the 
strong and adventurous in favour of the 
anaemic (in whose interest commonly the 
rules were framed). Every form of self- 
denial and humility is thus to be con- 
demned, except on one condition. These 
qualities are the note of all those who are by 
nature slaves. Among such they are to be 
fostered, not for any good they do to the 
slaves, but because they make them more 
ready of service to their masters. 

Everything is power; the world is always 
in flux; it never is. Supermen are life repre- 
sented by its highest moments of power, its 
concentrations in a classical epoch, an im- 
perial race, a triumphant personality. Spe- 
cies is but a name. Mankind is in no sense 
real or ideal, a unity. To talk of homo sum, 
humani nihil a me alienum puto is to talk 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 81 

nonsense. That maxim is the low-water 
mark of development, a symbol of the mon- 
grel world over which Rome ruled, the 
mishmash of the mob. The problem is to 
realise the highest type of man. This will 
be produced not by raising the people, but 
by producing a select caste of born com- 
manders. The only sense of moral virtue 
is command, whether inside the individ- 
ual or in relation to others. 1 A state, says 
Nietzsche, is simply "nature's roundabout 
way of making a few great individuals." 
At the moment under the influence of ideals, 
which are Christian in essence if not in 
name, the mob is too powerful for the strong 
personalities. That is why Napoleon failed 
— and Cesare Borgia. Our object should be 
to bring about conditions in which such men 
are the rule and no longer the exception. So 

1 " Das Nachdenken fiber Freiheit und Unf reiheit des Willens, 
bat mich zu einer Losung dieses Problems gefiihrt, die man sich 
griindlicher und abschliessender gar nicht denken kann — nam- 
lich zur Beseitigung des Problems vermoge der erlangten Ein- 
sicht: es giebt gar keinen Willen, weder einen freien noch einen 
unfreien." (Nietzsche, Werke, XIII, 263.) 

"Der freie Mensch ist ein Staat und eine Gesellschaft von 
Individuen." (Nietzsche, Werke, XII, 116.) 



82 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

far from the weak needing protection against 
the strong, it is the strong who need protec- 
tion against the unified jealousy of the weak, 
powerful only by numbers. The end can be 
reached only by securing a ruling race or 
class, and by such subordination and breed- 
ing as will keep individualities strong. To 
such an end the rest of mankind are only 
tools. In themselves they have no value. 
To take an instance, in art a genius gives 
value to his epoch, he is not the mere resul- 
tant of the other individuals in his milieu. 
The aristocrat exists for himself and for his 
order, not to serve the community. Yet 
even the aristocracy does not, like a body of 
voluptuaries, exist for itself alone. Its pur- 
pose (often unknown to its members) is to 
produce a higher type of man. Therefore it 
must have experience both of the heights 
and the depths. Its training must be 
Spartan, only more severe. It must shrink 
from nothing. All the old rules of morals 
vanish before it. The Ubermensch is beyond 
good and evil. Morality exists for the 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 83 

mediocre, the herd, the inhabitants of the 
world, in which you and I are alive. Europe 
is becoming more and more one; mediocrity 
is becoming more and more and more medi- 
ocre. As against this background of com- 
mon people, united by a slave morality, 
there is at the same time gradually defining 
itself, at present dimly seen, a master caste 
of free, adventurous spirits. They prepare 
the way for the superman. He is not yet 
here. The succeeding ages, even at their 
highest, are but the forerunners of the 
supermen of the future. To that far goal 
they must sacrifice themselves. This new 
nobility exists for itself alone. No sym- 
pathy or fellow-feeling with the slaves who 
are its instruments is to stain its sense of 
distinction. 

Distinction, indeed, the "pathos of dis- 
tance," must increase, until it reaches a 
higher point than that between a Roman 
Senator and his slaves. No existing aris- 
tocracy has enough of it. Nietzsche ad- 
mired the Prussian officer corps with its 



84 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

exclusive claims and discipline. 1 Not, how- 
ever, from the Germans does he hope for 
much; he treats them as more hostile to cul- 
ture than even the English, and declares 
that the presence of a German retards his 
digestion. 2 It is the "good Europeans" who 
are the beginning of the master race of the 
future. This does not mean the intellec- 
tuals in the university sense. All his life 



1 (Leben, II, 617.) "Man hat behauptet, dass mein Bruder 
stets eine starke Vorliebe fur den Adel und das deutsche Offizier- 
corps ausgesprochen habe. Mit vollem Recht — nur darf man den 
Begriff 'Adel' nicht zu eng fassen. In unserm demokratischen 
Zeitalter empfand er es als eine Wohlthat, dass es noch gesell- 
schaftliche Klassen gab, die den Muth hatten, sich abzusondern, 
die mannlichsten Tugenden alien andern voranzustellen, und 
welche Befehlen und Gehorchen in der Vollkom m enheit kennen 
und lernen. Allerdings wiinschte er, dass der Adel und das Offi- 
ziercorps strenger in der Forderung guter Herkunft bei der Ehe 
sei, scharfer in dem Sich-Abheben von dem Andern, tapferer und 
kraftiger in dem sich-selbst Ziel-setzen." 

Cf. Nietzsche's own words: 

"Die Zukunft der deutschen Kultur ruht auf den Sohnen der 
preussischen Offiziere." (Nietzsche Nachlass, Taschen-Ausgabe, 
VIII, 494.) 

2 "So ergiebt sich die seltsame Verbindung, dass ein durchaus 
international-gesinnter Mensch, ein Verkenner und Verachter des 
Deutschtums, das Geheimniss und den 'Geist' der erausspricht, die 
als specifisch-typische Deutsche sich am lautesten gebarden . . . 
werden." (Tonnies, Der Nietzsche Kultus, 10.) 

"England's Klein-Geisterei ist die grosse Gefahr jetzt auf der 
Erde. Ich sehe mehr Hang zu Grosse in den Gefiihlen der rus- 
sischen Nihihsten: als in denen der englischen UtiHtarier." 
(Nachlass, 8, 495.) 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 85 

Nietzsche was tilting at the culture-Philis- 
tines. He declares that it is not intellect 
that ennobles blood, but blood that enno- 
bles intellect, while a sedentary life is the 
sin against the Holy Ghost. What he wants 
is a more highly educated chivalry without 
the strong Christian element in the chival- 
rous ideal — a race of Alcibiades, and Borgia, 
freer, less bookish, less second-hand than 
the modern men of culture. Neither the 
Almanack de Gotha nor Minerva will give 
him what he wants. The peasantry has 
some of the qualities better developed than 
the modern culture of the newspaper and 
the cafe. This class, when it is established, 
will achieve *a transvaluation of all values. 
It will retranslate the word good into its 
older and more pagan equivalents, noble, 
proud, self-centred, courageous, barbarous. 
Some have debated as to how far Nietz- 
sche was looking to a new development 
of man, as a species. Did he think that 
evolution would produce a new species, dif- 
fering from man as much as man differs 



86 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

from the ape? This is denied by his sister. 
But we must treat her statements with 
reserve. She writes apologetic. Nietzsche 
is ever saying that man is not a goal but a 
bridge — that man is something that must be 
surpassed. 

Nietzsche, despite his dislike of Darwin 
and contempt for the Darwinians, was much 
under the influence of Darwin. Probably 
at times he dallied with the notion that the 
Ubermensch expressed a physiological devel- 
opment. 1 But it cannot be said to be a rul- 
ing thought. The Ubermensch is a vague 
term : it must be taken to express Nietzsche's 
dissatisfaction with man as he now is, and 
his belief that it is only by a radical height- 
ening of what to him are the noble elements 
in his nature, that things can be bettered. 2 
It means a higher type of man, something 



1 "Auch der hochste bleibt einMensch. . . . Der Ubermensch 
kann nicht das Endziel der Menschen sein; denn was ware 
dann das Endziel der Ubermenschen selber?" (Riehl, Friedrick 
Nietzsche, der Kiinstler und der Denker, 132.) 

2 "Der Ubermensch ist nichts als die Kristallform des Gedankens, 
dass der Mensch sich iiber sein Gegenwartsstadium hinausent- 
wickeln kann und also soil." (Simmel, 253.) 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 87 

better in the Nietzschean sense of better 
than we have now; a new kind of superior 
persons or race of persons. The superman 
is a new creature, not merely the race as it 
now is better educated. 1 

That raises a more important question: 2 
Is the superman an individual or a class? 
Here once more Nietzsche is not consistent. 
Much of his language favours the view that 
the superman is an individual, or a number 
of individuals; the strong man with intellect 
and no restraint. Much points that way in 
his taking of individuals such as Napoleon, 
Cesare Borgia, the individual man of virtu 
in Machiavelli's sense, the need of freedom 
from all morals, the nullity of communal 
claims, the statement that all fellowship 
is degrading, the value set upon solitude. 



x Werhe, XIV, § 281: "Das Christenthum hat darin Recht: 
man kann einen neuen Menschen anziehen." 

2 On the question whether the superman is an order or an indi- 
vidual, cf. especially Simmel, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche, and 
Dorner, Pessimismus, Nietzsche und Naturalismus ; Simmel be- 
lieves it to be a race; Dorner takes the new Herren-Order as pre- 
paratory to the superman. Belart in his book on Wagners und 
Nietzsches Freundschafts-Tragodie quotes eight varieties of the 
superman. 



88 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

Yet, on the other hand, we have his definite 
statement that what he looks for is a new 
hierarchy of ranks, that his works are di- 
rected to the new master class and the often- 
repeated injunction that the higher man is 
to endure discipline and suffer. The truth 
is, that in view of Nietzsche's repudiation of 
sheer egoism, the problem is immaterial. 
We may say, perhaps, that his supermen 
will be separate individuals, arising out of 
but not identical with the master class, 
formed by discipline to severity; or we may 
say that they are a set of individuals. But 
in any case he allows them no absolute free- 
dom. They are to be governed by the 
ideal of distinction, "Vornehmheit" gentle- 
manliness, as we might say. They are to be 
free of morals in the sympathetic sense, but 
more than others are they to be bound by 
the morality of courage. The superman is 
to incarnate personality at its highest, in- 
volving self-control, adventure, fine man- 
ners, and powers of command. If it is a 
superclass of which Nietzsche is thinking, 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 89 

he would not allow mere heredity apart 
from discipline and fitness to be a claim to 
membership. If it is an individual or indi- 
viduals, clearly again they will not be super- 
men merely by pleasing themselves, but 
must incarnate certain qualities of ascend- 
ing life. 1 The social element is never en- 
tirely absent from Nietzsche's thought, 
however much some of his followers may 
repudiate it. Nothing is farther from his 
intention than to pander to mere unbridled 
egoism in the individual, although, despite 
his intention, that is very often the result of 
his teaching. At any rate, there can be no 
doubt that Nietzsche looked forward to a 
new aristocracy. It is to be a society re- 
cruited upon blood and training, resting 
upon a slave system, kept pure by eugenic 
methods. 2 It will develop in common the 

1 "Zarathustra gliicklich daruber, dass der Kampf der Stande 
voriiber ist, und jetzt endlich Zeit ist fur erne Rangordnung der 
Individuen. Hass auf das demokratische Nivellirungs-System ist 
nur im Vordergrund: eigentlich ist er sehr froh, dass dies so weit 
ist. Nun kann er seine Aufgabe losen." (Nietzsche, Werke, XI, 
417.) 

2 On Nietzsche's relation to eugenics and biology see Richter, 
Nietzsche et les thSories biologiques contemporaines. 



90 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

virtues characteristic of an aristocracy, and 
it is to produce forms of culture higher than 
anything hitherto known — to carry forward 
the work of the Romans, as they might have 
developed, had not they been attacked by 
the corrupting virus of Christianity. This 
aristocracy is not the servant of society, but, 
on the other hand, it is not its own master; 
it exists for the raising of the type man. 
Rome, Nietzsche says often, offered the 
nearest approach to his ideal. The new 
rulers will no more regard themselves as 
servants of the mob than a Roman would 
think of duties towards his slaves. Rather 
they will incarnate the ideal of Dionysos; 
this in one place he seems to identify with 
barbarism and sensuality. On Nietzsche's 
principles we might look forward a millen- 
nium or two and see in a vision a race of 
masters, seated in a grander Colosseum, 
once more urging on torturers to whip their 
slave-gladiators into courage by white-hot 
electric rods, in order that their aesthetic 
sensibilities may be stimulated. We need 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 91 

not suppose that Nietzsche desired this. 
But it would be a natural result of the ac- 
ceptance of his principles. Clearly, he says 
that he wants more barbarism, that un- 
counted sufferings are needed to produce his 
new lords; to this end all other men are 
mere tools. Nietzsche is not to be blamed 
for asserting that higher powers in life are 
worth having at the cost of suffering; or 
that if culture is to reach a higher stage 
much must be gone through for it. Where 
he is wrong is in his attempt to purchase 
these goods, not only apart from the world 
at large, but deliberately at its cost. His 
system, if it is to be called a system, is a 
new return to Nature; less idyllic than that 
of the eighteenth century with its cry: 

"I am as free as Nature first made man 
Ere the base laws of servitude began 
When wild in woods the noble savage ran." l 

Sick of the stuffy atmosphere of academic 
lecture-halls, Nietzsche cries for the free and 

1 Dryden, Conquest of Granada. 



92 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

open air. Wearied with domestic virtues 
and morality in petto, he hails barbaric 
grandeur. From the mean streets of mod- 
ern civilisation he calls men to Alpine 
heights of danger and triumph, despising 
above all things utilitarian democracy and 
the optimism of inevitable progress, with its 
gospel of the sofa-millennium. Nietzsche 
boldly proclaims life to be immoral and 
preaches a gospel for the few. "Pulchrum 
est paucorum hominum" is one of his favour- 
ite tags. His desire is to herald a new Re- 
naissance when man "free from moralic acid" 
shall display the splendours of individual- 
ity, and a brighter Borgia shall win a more 
enduring triumph. Nietzsche was angry 
at being compared with Carlyle. Yet in 
some respects the superman is curiously 
like Carlyle's strong man. Nor need we 
forget that while Carlyle bade men fall 
down and worship Frederick the Great, 
Nietzsche declared that the present Kaiser 
would be able to understand the Will to 
Power. Maybe he was right. 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 93 

This Will to Power is the expression of 
life. The yea-saying to life, i. e., to all 
reality and not merely to a part of it is 
the fundamental maxim of Nietzsche. But, 
he argues, if we are to say yes to any mo- 
ment, we ought logically to desire that 
moment to recur. Besides, the energy in 
thejworld is limited in amount. Had there 
been any goal of all this striving it would 
long ago have been manifest. Since no 
such goal has been seen, and since the num- 
ber of combinations is limited, Nietzsche 
deems it certain that the whole universe is 
turning for ever on its axis. Every event 
even in its minute detail is repeated in- 
finitely. This doctrine of the eternal re- 
currence is not much dwelt upon by Nietz- 
sche's disciples. Yet it is integral to his 
thought. He himself declares it to be the 
central doctrine of Zarathustra. Early in 
his life in the second of the Essays Out of 
Season Nietzsche had adumbrated the idea. 
Not until later did it become one of his 
chief articles of faith. The notion is the 



94 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

ancient one of the Annus Platonicus. 
First of all, the thought that he would 
have to go through everything over again 
filled Nietzsche with unutterable repul- 
sion. Afterwards he conte nplated it with 
a certain mystic awe. Mainly does his 
sister, Frau Forster-Nietzsche, endeavour 
to minimise its importance to him. The 
despised Frau Lou Andreas-Salome is more 
trustworthy on this point. One or two 
passages will serve to set it forth: 

" 'Behold/ I continued, 'this moment ! 
From this gateway called moment a 
long, eternal lane runneth backward : 
behind us lieth an eternity. 

"'Must not all that can run of things 
have run already through this lane? 
Must not what can happen of things 
have happened, have been done and 
have run past here? 

"'And if all things have happened al- 
ready: what dost thou dwarf think of 
this moment? Must not this gateway 
have existed previously also? 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 95 

" 'And are not thus all things knotted 
fast together that this moment draweth 
behind it all future things? Conse- 
quently — draweth itself as well? 

6 ' For what can run of things — in that 
long lane out there, it must run once more ! 

' 'And this slow spider creeping in the 
moonshine, and this moonshine itself, 
and I and thou in the gateway whisper- 
ing together, whispering of eternal things, 
must not we all have existed once in 
the past ? 

"And must not we recur and run in 
that other lane, out there, before us, 
in that long, haunted lane — must we 
not recur eternally?' 

"Thus, I spake and ever more gently. 
For I was afraid of mine own thoughts 
and back-thoughts." 1 

Here is a more prosaic expression of the 
same idea: 

"If the universe may be conceived as 
a definite quantity of energy, as a def- 

1 Zarathustra, 230. 



96 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

inite number of centres of energy — and 
every other concept remains indefinite 
and therefore useless — it follows there- 
from that the universe must go through a 
calculable number of combinations in the 
great game of chance which constitutes its 
existence. In infinity at some moment 
or other, every possible combination 
must once have been realised; not only 
this, but it must have been realised an 
infinite number of times. And inas- 
much as between every one of these 
combinations and its next recurrence 
every other possible combination would 
necessarily have been undergone, and 
since every one of these combinations 
would determine the whole series in the 
same order, a circular movement of 
absolutely identical series is thus demon- 
strated: the universe is thus shown to 
be a circular movement which has al- 
ready repeated itself an infinite num- 
ber of times, and which plays its game 
for all eternity. This conception is not 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 97 

simply materialistic; for if it were this, 
it would not involve an infinite recur- 
rence of identical cases, but a finite 
state. Owing to the fact that the uni- 
verse has not reached this finite state, 
materialism shows itself to be but an 
imperfect and provisional hypothesis." 1 

The doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence 
served three purposes: 

1. It justified a certain mystical at- 
titude of reverence by giving an element 
of eternity to every act. This would other- 
wise have been lacking in a system accord- 
ing to which all things are for ever in rapid 
movement. Nietzsche said that it marks 
the nearest possible approach of the ideas of 
Being and Becoming. His frequent phrase, 
"Eternity is sought by all delight," is a ne- 
cessity of the artist-nature. 

2. It supplied the place of a faith in 
immortality. Nietzsche was a forward- 
looking spirit. He could not face the 

1 The Will to Power, II, 430. 



98 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

thought of extinction. Disbelieving in 
any transcendent world, he had no hope 
of any individual life beyond, no resur- 
rection, not even its pale philosophic coun- 
terpart, the immortality of the soul. Nor 
is absorption in the All of any attraction, 
if there be no unity in things. The eternal 
recurrence does assure a sort of immortal- 
ity, although purely unconscious. It pro- 
vides the only form in which Nietzsche 
could preserve something of the values 
of immortality, while keeping clear of all 
faith in an unseen world. 

3. This doctrine, as Professor Simmel 
points out, gave Nietzsche the right to 
formulate a new canon of ethics, akin to 
that of Kant. Kant had said: "Act so 
that the principle of thy action may be a 
universal law." Nietzsche would say, or 
might say: "Act as though your action 
were to be eternally repeated." 1 Such a 
canon gives dignity to the moment and 

1 "Meine Lehre sagt: so leben dass du wunschen musst, wieder 
zu leben, ist die Aufgabe — du wirst es jedenfalls." (Nietzsche, 
Werhe, XII, 64, § 116.) 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 99 

preserves the doer from what is base. 
Such words as base and noble may seem 
strange in a writer who professedly repu- 
diates all moral responsibility. Nietzsche 
is radically inconsistent. His yea-saying 
to life might mean only that we accept 
whatever happens after the event. But 
since Nietzsche regards all remorse as due 
to illusion, and repudiates freedom of 
choice, he can have no right to rank acts. 
Yet he does so. His whole system is based 
on selection, on the notion that some kind 
of actions are of worth and some are not, 
although these differ for different classes. 1 
On no other hypothesis can his violence of 
abuse of Christian ethics be justified, even 
on Nietzsche's own showing. Briefly, the 
morals of Nietzsche consist in an exalta- 

a The following passage gives Nietzsche's own account of his 
first perception of the Will to Power, and shows how it arose to 
counteract the plethora of sympathy aroused by the sufferings 
of the wounded: 

"So vollstandig der Ausdruck einer Rasse die siegen, herrschen 
oder untergehen will — 'da fiihlte ich wohl, meine Schwester,' 
fugte mein Bruder hinzu, 'dass der starkste und hochste Wille 
zum Leben nicht in einem elenden Ringen urn's Dasein zum Aus- 
druck kommt, sondern als Wille zum Kampf, als Wille zur 
Macht und Ubermacht."' (Leben, II, 683.) 



100 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

tion of courage and a rejection of all other 
moral values, and a sense of the value of 
distinction and individuality. "Live dan- 
gerously," is his motto, and live differently 
from others. 1 

The romantic expression of sheer nat- 
uralism is, perhaps, the best account that 
can be given of this gospel. Nietzsche 
had discarded all supernatural values. He 
was not unnaturally disgusted with the 



1 The barrenness of the mere empty notion of power is well 
stated here: 

"Kurz: in Nietzsche verbindet sich der Naturalismus mit der 
Romantik. . . . 

"Aber sein oberstes Prinzip ist widerspruchsvoll; der Wille zur 
Macht oder besser die Machtaktionen die eo ipso Anderes brau- 
chen, um sich auszubreiten. Je machtiger eine Aktionsgruppe, ein 
Selbst, urn so ohnmachtiger macht sie die Anderen Das Leben 
ist irrational an sich, Kampf mit sich selbst. Von einem Ganzen 
der Welt kann eigentlich Keiner reden, und doch redet er von dem 
Ganzen." (Dorner, Pessimismus, Nietzsche und Naturalismus, 
189.) 

"Die formale Macht wird wie ein Selbstzweck behandelt. 
Aber die Macht ist kein Selbstzweck. Es kommt darauf an, wozu 
die Macht verwendet wird. Weil Kultur da ist, ist Kampf um 
die Kultur. Aber die Kultur ist nicht bloss Mittel fur die for- 
male Macht. Wenn die Macht nur auf der Ausbeutung des 
Fremden beruht, was ist sie an sich selbst? Was hat diese Aus- 
beutung fur einen Wert ? Nietzsche redet von der Vergeistigung 
der Macht; aber woher der Geist bei seinem ausschliesslich physi- 
ologischen Standpunkte ? Was versteht er unter Geist ? Er hat 
ihn in die metaphysische Rumpelkammer verwiesen und will ihn 
nun doch wieder zitieren." (Ibid., 191.) 



THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 101 

prevailing Pantheistic idealism of the Uni- 
versities. His romantic tendency combined 
with the relics of the system of Schopen- 
hauer to produce the doctrine of the Will 
to Power. Essentially he accepts the stand- 
point of naturalism; and grafts on to it 
a religious attitude in the maxims of yea- 
saying to Life, and the Eternal Return. 
It is described by Papini as a dithyrambic 
transfiguration of evolutionary naturalism. 1 

1 "Io credo per conto mio che la piu espressiva definizione che si 
possa dare della filosofia de Nietzsche sia questa — una transfi- 
gurazione ditirambica del naturalismo evoluzionista." (Papini, 
op. ciL, 238.) 



Ill 

NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 

Nietzsche regarded it as one of his 
greatest achievements in originality, that 
he was the first to perceive the true na- 
ture of Christianity. 1 As we saw, it is 
with Christianity as a way of life that he 
is concerned. So far as it is a doctrine 
of the other world, Nietzsche always as- 
sumes without argument that it is a sys- 
tem of lies. The only question for him is 
what person or group of persons developed 
his will to power through these lies. Chris- 

1 "Man hat bisher das Christenthum immer auf eine falsche, 
und nicht bloss schiichterne Weise angegriffen. So lange man 
nicht die Moral des Christenthums als Kapitalverbrechen am 
Leben empfindet, haben dessen Vertheidiger gutes Spiel. Die 
Frage der blossen 'Wahrheit' des Christenthums — sei es in 
Hinsicht auf die Existenz seines Gottes, oder die Geschicht- 
lichkeit seiner Entstehungslegende, gar nicht zu reden von der 
christlichen Astronomie und Naturwissenschaft — ist eine ganz 
nebensachliche Angelegenheit so lange die Werthfrage der christ- 
lichen Moral nicht beriihrt ist. Taugt die Moral des Christen- 
thums etwas, oder ist sie eine Schandung und Schmach trotz aller 
Heiligkeit der Verf uhrungskiinste ? " (Leben, I, 30.) 

102 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 103 

tianity is a system of ethics, and it must 
be judged alongside of all other systems 
of ethics, which have the same or similar 
principles. In Ecce Homo he recounts 
his services to posterity: 1 

"No one hitherto has felt Christian 
morality beneath him; to that end there 
were needed light and remoteness of vi- 
sion, and an abysmal psychological depth, 
not believed to be possible hitherto. Up 
to the present, Christian morality has 
been the Circe of all thinkers — they stood 
at her service. What man before my 
time had descended into the underground 
caverns from out of which the poisonous 

1 "Ich habe jetzt mit einem Cynismus der welthistorisch 
werden wird, mich selbst erzahlt. Das Buch heisst Ecce Homo, 
und ist ein Attentat ohne die geringste Riicksicht auf den Ge- 
kreuzigten; es endet in Donnern und Wetterschlagen gegen Alles 
was christlich oder christlich-infekt ist, bei denen Einem Sehen 
und Horen vergeht. Ich bin zuletzt der erste Psychologe des 
Christenthums und kann, als alter Artillerist der ich bin, schweres 
Geschiitz vorfahren, von dem kein Gegner des Christenthums 
auch nur die Existenz vermuthet hat. . . . Ich schwore Ihnen 
zu dass wir in zwei Jahren die ganze Erde in Convulsionen haben 
werden. Ich bin ein Verhangniss." (Nietzsche to Brandes, Brief e, 
HI, 321.) Nietzsche must have been thinking of Antichrist, not 
of Ecce Homo. 



104 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

fumes of this ideal — of this slandering of 
the world — burst forth?" 1 



"What separates us, is not that we 
do not rediscover any God, either in 
history or in nature or behind nature — 
but that we recognise what was wor- 
shipped as God not as 'divine,' but as 
pitiable, as absurd, as injurious — not only 
as an error, but as a crime against life. 
We deny God as God. If this God of the 
Christians were proved to us, we should 
still less know how to believe in him. 
In a formula: Deus qualem Paulus creavit, 
Dei negatio" 2 

"I call Christianity the one great 
curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, 
the one great instinct of revenge, for 
which no expedient is sufficiently poison- 
ous, secret, subterranean, mean — I call 
it the one immortal blemish of man- 
kind." 3 

"That which deifies me, that which 

1 Ecce Homo, 138. 2 Antichrist, 316. 3 Ibid., 354. 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 105 

makes me stand apart from the whole 
of the rest of humanity is the fact that 
I have unmasked Christian morality. 
. . . Christian morality is the most 
malignant form of all falsehood, the 
actual Circe of humanity, that which 
has corrupted mankind." 1 

One or two passages from the many 
which express Nietzsche's attitude may 
be taken as samples. They might be 
multiplied almost to any extent. No one 
familiar with Nietzsche's writings in his 
last period will deny their representative 
quality. 

His point is that all merely theoretical 
and historical criticism is worthless, so 
long as the Christian values are retained. 
Moreover, supposing the Christian values 
are in themselves unobjectionable, such 
criticism would be needless, and even 
harmful. Nietzsche considered truth to 
be merely the illusion that was useful. 

1 Ecce Homo, 139. 



106 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

"Wherever the will to power declines 
in any way, there is always also a physio- 
logical retrogression, a decadence. The 
Deity of decadence, pruned of his man- 
liest virtues and impulses, henceforth, 
becomes necessarily the God of the 
physiologically retrograde, the weak. 
They do not call themselves the weak, 
they call themselves the 'good.' . . . 
It is obvious (without a further hint 
being necessary) in what moments of 
history only, the dualistic fiction of a 
good and a bad God became possible. 
Through the same instinct by which 
the subjugated lower their God to the 
'good in itself,' they obliterate the 
good qualities out of the God of their 
conquerors; they take revenge on their 
masters by bedevilling their God. The 
good God, just like a devil; both are 
abortions of decadence. How can one 
defer so much to the simplicity of Chris- 
tian theologians as to decree with them 
that the continuous development of God 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 107 

from the 'God of Israel,' from the na- 
tional God to the Christian God, to 
the essence of everything good, is a 
progress? But so does even Renan. . . . 
It is just the very opposite that strikes 
the eye. When the presuppositions of 
ascending life, when everything strong, 
brave, domineering and proud has been 
eliminated out of the concept of God, 
when he sinks step by step to the sym- 
bol of a staff for the fatigued, a sheet- 
anchor for all drowning ones, when he 
becomes the poor people's God, the 
sinners' God, the God of the sick par 
excellence, and when the predicate of 
Saviour, Redeemer, is left as the sole 
divine predicate, what does such a change 
speak of? such a reduction of the divine? 
To be sure, the kingdom of God has 
thereby become greater. Formerly, he 
had only his people, his * chosen' people. 
Since then he has gone abroad in his 
travels, quite like his people itself; since 
then he has never again settled down 



108 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

quietly in any place, until he has finally 
become at home everywhere, the great 
'cosmopolitan' — till he has gained over 
the 'great number,' and the half of 
earth to his side. But the God of the 
'great number,' the democrat among 
Gods, became, nevertheless, no proud 
pagan God; he remained a Jew, he re- 
mained the God of the woods, the God 
of all dark corners and places, of all 
unhealthy quarters throughout the world. 
. . . His world empire is still, as for- 
merly, an underworld empire, a hos- 
pital, a subterranean empire, a Ghetto- 
empire. . . . And he himself so pale, 
so weak, so decadent. Even the palest of 
the pale still became master over him — 
the Metaphysicians, the conceptual Al- 
binos. They spun round about him 
so long, until hypnotised by their move- 
ments he became a cobweb-spinner, a 
metaphysician himself. Henceforth, he 
spun the world anew out of himself — 
sub specie Spinozse — henceforth he trans- 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 109 

figured himself always into the thinner 
and the paler, he became 'ideal,' he be- 
came 'pure spirit,' he became 'absolu- 
tum,' he became 'thing in itself,' Ruin 
of a God . . . God became thing in 
itself. . . . 

" The Christian concept of God — God as 
God of the sick, God as cobweb-spinner, 
God as spirit — is one of the most cor- 
rupt concepts of God ever arrived at 
on earth; it represents perhaps the gauge 
of low water in the descending develop- 
ment of the God type. God degenerated 
to the contradiction of life, instead of 
being its transfiguration and its eternal 
yea! In God hostility announced to life, 
to nature, to the will to life. God as the 
formula for every calumny of 'this world,' 
for every lie of 'another world.' 1 In God 
nothingness deified, the will to nothing- 
ness declared holy ! . . . 

"This hybrid image of ruin derived 



1 We may compare with this Mark Pattison's dictum that the 
; idea of God had been defecated to a gure transparency." 



110 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

from nullity, concept, and contradic- 
tion, in which all decadence instincts, all 
cowardices, and lassitudes of soul have 
their sanction." * 

■ 

This is strong language. But it is not 
mere extravagance. Nietzsche does not set 
out only to epater le bourgeois. He is not 
amused with things, he is passionate in 
his sense of the value of life, and in hatred 
of all that he thought opposed to fulness 
of life. To appreciate his purpose, we must 
recur to the fundamental doctrine of the 
Will to Power, as the one reality. All 
other-worldly values are false coin. The 
problem is to determine what kind of man 
finds his account in uttering this coinage. 
Briefly, the answer is that Christianity is 
the boomerang-throw of the slave races 
by which they have taken captive their 
conquerors. The theory is simple. 

What, first of all, is the origin of con- 
science? According to Nietzsche, con- 

1 Antichrist, 260-2. 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 111 

science arises from the taming of man by 
civilisation. As society settles down, fight- 
ing ceases to be the main work of man; 
cruelty, moreover, in private life has less 
free scope. Consequently, man turns his 
need of inflicting pain upon his inner 
being, and suffering results. This un- 
pleasantness inside is a fact. The priest 
and all who share his instincts proceed 
to exploit it. They invent the doctrine 
of moral freedom and responsibility. By 
this means, man is led to feel that the pain 
is his own fault. The conception of guilt 
is introduced. With the sense of burden 
self-created but irremovable by his own 
efforts, man develops the need of redemp- 
tion. Ascetic morality of all kinds is due 
to the belief that, if man will but add a 
little self-inflicted pain, the ill conscience 
will be removed. Man is willing to suffer, 
and indeed to increase his suffering, if 
only he can be persuaded that the pain 
has an object. That object, the negation 
of the will, is the aim of morality. Chris- 



112 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

tianity is little more than the most trium- 
phant form of this tendency, which arises 
from the instinct of priests (men of no 
real personal force, but great ingenuity) 
to secure power for themselves. In this 
way they get power which the weakness 
of their personality would otherwise pre- 
vent. Among priests he includes moralists 
and most philosophers. He starts from 
the true notion that right and wrong are 
fundamental values. He will have noth- 
ing to do with the English utilitarian 
moralists and associationists, who teach 
that the idea of right is merely the com- 
munal sanction of what is useful to men 
in general. Good and evil are original 
value-judgments. Like all our ideas, they 
come from the will to power. Power, 
satisfied, triumphant, embodied in a con- 
quering race, "the splendid blond beast" 
calls all its own characteristics good. Good 
meant in the first instance the qualities 
of a ruling class. It is the same as noble 
and implies courage and an enduring will, 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 113 

pride, and self-sufficiency. Its opposite 
is the character of the enslaved people, 
base, mean, villainous. Thus, goodness 
has nothing to do with love, humility, 
justice, or self-denial. These qualities are 
displayed by the down-trodden, or at 
least admired by them. Do unto others as 
ye would that they should do to you is the 
maxim of the herd, the helot, the outcast, 
the chandala. For the slave world, since 
it goes on living, has its own will to power. 
It is ever seeking to turn the tables on its 
masters. To do this subtlety is needed. 
Victory in the field is not to be thought 
of. If, however, the slaves can instil 
into their masters a belief that the highest 
moral values are those qualities which 
slaves are forced to display, gentleness, 
meekness, self-sacrifice, industry, obedience, 
pity, they may gradually reverse the order 
and once more rule their masters. The 
superior culture of Greece took captive the 
Romans. Christian morality is a similar 
effort, only it is exercised not by a real 



114 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

culture, like that of Greece, but by a 
spurious set of moral values, the so-called 
Christian virtues. The terrain of the con- 
flict has been changed before the masters 
were aware of the fact. The herd will 
treat as good — and by their numbers and 
cunning will ultimately make even their 
rulers think good — those qualities which 
unite people in herds and keep them in 
subjection. In this way they have achieved 
a trans valuation of all values. The new 
values thus grow upward from below, 
until at last the masters begin to have a 
bad conscience for pride and self-sufficiency. 
They will even stoop so low as to pretend 
that their sole claim to rule is based on 
service of the community. The maxim: 
"I am among you, as a slave" has raised 
Jesus of Nazareth to be Lord in name of 
the world. "He that is greatest among 
you let him be your minister" is the ex- 
pression of the same principle by one 
who believed it. Its real import is that 
by affecting to minister to others, a weak 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 115 

man or race will win greatness. In this 
revolution, which began in early times, 
priests are the leaders. They are, as they 
claim, not rulers but shepherds. They 
symbolise and heighten the power of the 
herd as against the unique, the rare, the 
distinguished. Priesthood represents the 
success of the mob, the chandala, the herd 
morality. By this means a mental empire 
is established vested in them, and polit- 
ical dependence is avenged. 

Morals, i, e., all morals based on any 
doctrine of humanity, are due to the in- 
stinct of revenge. They are the will to 
power of impotent, decaying folk. "Moral- 
ity is the idiosyncrasy of the decadent 
revenging themselves upon Life." The 
Jews are the most outstanding instance. 
That race, mean and ignoble like all 
cowards, was willing to sacrifice every- 
thing to its desire to live. It went on 
despite political annihilation. The will 
to power, was only dormant and began 
to reassert itself. Firstly, its priests turned 



116 THE WILL TO FEEEDOM 

all its history topsyturvy, and changed 
every m moral value. The Old Testament 
contains ample evidence that originally 
the Hebrews were as other nations, and 
their God a prince of power. This, how- 
ever, has been changed by the priestly 
caste, and the conception of Jehovah as 
a loving Father, and of holiness and all 
the mean virtues of "fellowship" have 
been introduced and suffered to corrupt 
the ancient story. In Jesus of Nazareth 
the Jewish race produced a man who car- 
ried still further this philosophy of re- 
sentment. Our Lord was consumed with 
Love and led a revolt inside the Jewish 
nation of the poor and outcast against 
the aristocracy of Jerusalem. He died 
for his own guilt, and in modern days 
would have been sent to Siberia; for he 
asserted the superiority before God of 
the "poor, the maimed, the halt, and the 
blind," and denied the claims of the rulers. 
In bringing our Lord to the Cross, the 
Jewish spirit performed its master-stroke. 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 117 

By crucifying him as a criminal (which 
he was), and then proclaiming the King- 
dom of the Crucified and Risen Saviour, 
it secured for a couple of thousand years 
the triumph of Hebrew, i. e., slave valua- 
tions. The Incarnation is the apotheosis of 
slave morality. 

The world at large was in a state which 
enabled the movement to win success. 
Multitudes of slaves filled the Roman 
Empire. These were eager to fall in with 
any system which would restore their 
dignity. The mixture of races all through 
the Empire brought with it a physiological 
depression, which, disguised as the sense 
of sin, made men eager for a salvation 
cult. 1 Add to this that Socrates and Plato, 
the great Greek decadents, had long cor- 
rupted the pagan mind with notions of 
goodness, justice, and the Eternal world. 2 

1 "Alie unsere Religionen und Philosophien sind Symptome 
unseres leiblichen Befindens: dass das Christenthum zum Sieg 
kam, war die Folge eines allgemeinen Unlust-Gefiihls, und einer 
Rassen-Vermischung." (Nietzsche, Werke, XVI, 250.) 

2 It is easily seen how this notion of the genesis of the Catholic 
Christianity underlies the whole work of Houston Stewart Cham- 
berlin — The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. 



118 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

The persecution of Christians by the state 
was foolish, for it gave them precisely the 
leverage which they needed, as Apostles 
of the Cross, and enabled them in very 
deed to make their strength "perfect in 
weakness." Even the Roman Law and 
the stoic moralists prepared the way; for 
although in regard to slaves, the ruling 
order kept its hand on the whip, in theory 
it was admitted that men were by nature 
free, that man as man deserves to be con- 
sidered, that justice, not force, is the end 
of social institutions. All these tendencies 
united to help on the march of the Chris- 
tian Church from the catacombs to the 
chair of St. Peter; and transformed the 
fisherman of Galilee into the prince of the 
Apostles, the slave of the slaves of God 
into the Yicar-General of the Universe. 
The Church was able to clothe it all in 
a philosophic or semiphilosophic garb, and 
to provide a symbol which for a time en- 
slaved alike the intellect and the heart of 
man. At last, through its leadership of 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 119 

the slave races and lower orders, the Church 
of Christ was able to triumph over the 
Pagan Empire, the proudest and most 
valuable organisation of the Will to Power, 
which the world has hitherto seen. 

All this is the victory of decadence. 
All morality is decadence. Ascending life 
is ever pitiless and proud. Christianity, 
it is true, is nowadays out of fashion as 
a creed. Yet men deceive themselves. 
Its poison lurks in all the idealisms of 
the day, in the generally accepted code of 
moral values, in democratic equality, in 
nearly every notion of the so-called free- 
thinkers. 1 Nietzsche with his band of 
free spirits will topple over the house of 

1 George Eliot. "They have got rid of the Christian God, and 
now think themselves obliged to cling firmer than ever to Chris- 
tian morality, that is English consistency; we shall not lay the 
blame of it on ethical girls a la Eliot. In England for every 
little emancipation from divinity, people have to reacquire 
respectability by becoming moral fanatics in an awe-inspiring 
manner. That is the penalty they have to pay there. With 
us it is different. When we give up Christian belief, we there- 
by deprive ourselves of the right to maintain a stand on Chris- 
tian morality. This is not at all obvious of itself, we have again 
and again to make this point clear, in defiance of English shallow- 
pates. Christianity is a system, a view of things, consistently 
thought out and complete. If we break out of it a fundamental 
idea, the belief in God, we thereby break the whole in pieces." 
(Twilight of the Idols, 167.) 



120 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

cards. The old pagan valuation Will be 
restored. The trans valuation will be ef- 
fected. So important is this aim of 
Nietzsche, that his final period is ^some- 
times spoken of as his Umwerthungszeit. 
Meanwhile, Christian, moralist, humani- 
tarian ideals are not to be allowed to 
drop. They are to be retained, as the 
most useful for the mass of men, the 
herd. With the general tendency of the 
world to become more mediocre, with the 
ever-growing clamour of the triumphant 
middle-class, Nietzsche would not inter- 
fere. Against this and out of it as a back- 
ground will the new ruling order define 
itself. Herein a few spirits, courageous, 
intellectual, and highly tempered as steel, 
the philosophers of the superman world, 
will rule. They are the first order. Of 
the second order are the warrior class, 
Kings and statesmen. Both these are priv- 
ileged, beyond good and evil, free from 
the herd morality. Curious it is to no- 
tice how like is Nietzsche's conception to 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 121 

the mediaeval doctrine of the two swords, 
with the spiritual first and the ruler govern- 
ing in his interest. 

Let us now consider in detail Nietzsche's 
account of Christianity. 

1. It is based upon an essential mis- 
understanding. Nietzsche has identified 
the pessimistic ethic of Schopenhauer with 
the ideals of Christianity. Both agree in 
this. They teach self-denial, and this in 
some sense is a principle of every system, 
which selects between actions. If any 
actions are selected, there must be self- 
denial, or in times of stress we shall choose 
the opposite course. This ascetic quality 
ought to have been no objection to 
Nietzsche, for Nietzsche's whole notion 
of the superman involves severe discipline, 
i. e. 9 self-denial. He even goes so far as 
to say that he wanted a natural asceticism. 
All that Nietzsche said in favour of an 
enduring will, his attitude to suffering 
as the condition of insight, is in fact very 



122 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

similar to the Christian. Creighton said 
that suffering gives an insight denied to 
thought, and Hort declared that power of 
life means power of suffering. Both of 
these maxims are in full accordance with 
the teaching of Nietzsche. Nietzsche in 
no way taught a doctrine of voluptuous 
enjoyment. No man whose vision is of 
the far future would do that. He has 
indeed been blamed for this ascetic side, 
but unfairly. 1 

All asceticism, from the training of the 
athlete to that of the scholar, from the 
discipline of the child to the experience 
of a St. John of the Cross, may direct 
similar acts, or abstinences — a fact which 
is too often forgotten, when people either 
attack or defend the morality of the Cross. 
The question is in regard to every act of ap- 
parent and immediate self-denial; whether 
it be to abstain from alcohol, or to face 
an almost certain death in the trenches 
— to what purpose is this waste ? Is the 

1 E. g., by Seillieres, Apollon ou Dionysos. 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 123 

ointment of man's tears to be poured 
out, and the alabaster of his gifts to be 
broken for a noble or an ignoble pur- 
pose ? Is the result to be the development 
or the annihilation of the personality? 
The latter is the teaching of Schopen- 
hauer, of Buddhism, and of the various 
forms of Oriental pessimism. To them the 
individual being is the supreme evil, or else 
the curse of existence. Christianity and 
Nietzsche also might commend the same 
ascetic practices as the Buddhist; but the 
object is different. Always it is the devel- 
opment of the personality — not its extinc- 
tion. It is a negative means to reach a 
positive end. "I am come that they might 
have life, and might have it more abun- 
dantly" is the principle of Christian asceti- 
cism; every whit as much as the expansion 
of Life is the maxim of Nietzsche. It may 
be that now and then the means are unwise, 
in which case they are analogous to over- 
training a crew for a race. Sometimes, 
also, Christian teachers with too little 



124 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

hold on the sacramental principle, or with 
Pantheistic leanings, may have taught a 
doctrine of Christian self-denial which is 
truly negative and Oriental. That does 
not affect the main issue. Christianity is 
essentially sacramental in the doctrine of 
the Incarnate Lord and the Risen Body. 
It does not teach the neglect of the body, 
except in so far as any act of discipline in- 
volves the postponement of immediate 
ease for some greater good. Moreover, 
as Nietzsche knew, even for bodily health 
a too meticulous thoughtfulness will de- 
feat its own ends. A little carelessness is 
essential. The risks it involves are less 
than those which it avoids. Now and then 
Nietzsche admits and even deplores the 
effect of Christianity exercised in height- 
ening the sense of individual worth; for 
it did this for all, whereas it is only the 
few whose personality is worth develop- 
ing. On the whole, however, Nietzsche 
never freed himself from the doctrine of 
Schopenhauer, that all morality is in the 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 125 

literal sense self-abnegation, and is to culmi- 
nate in the destruction of the will to live. 

Thus he is ever repeating the charge, 
that Christianity is the supremely deca- 
dent religion, nihilism. He might have 
been undeceived, had he read a little more 
Church history, or even studied the New 
Testament which he so heartily despised. 
He could hardly then have ignored the 
words about abundant life and fulness of 
joy — while St. Paul's frequent references 
to joy in suffering would seem almost de- 
signed to meet Nietzsche's own experience. 
It is not the sense of weakness, but of 
power that is the most obvious thing in 
the psychology of the early Christians. 
Two great facts about the Church impress 
themselves upon the reader of the New 
Testament: (1) it was possessed by a 
spirit of power; (2) it was a separating, 
distinguishing force, adding to dignity: 
"Ye are a holy nation, a royal priesthood, 
a peculiar people." True, Nietzsche might 
counter this by saying it was power for 



126 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

the wrong sort of people, and distinction 
for those by nature undistinguished. 

The truth is that the Church of God 
so far from being a denial of life has been 
and now is the greatest yea-saying force 
in the world. 1 That does not mean that 
it refuses to select between actions or to 
forbid those which are less admirable. 
Neither does Nietzsche. Any yea-saying 
which involves courage, involves also no- 
saying. Nietzsche is right, when he says 
that education should be directed rather 
to make the will taut than to convey 
information. That, however, cannot be 
done without a no-saying, which is equally 
important, perhaps more so than yea-say- 
ing. 

Nietzsche never discerns power except 



1 "Nietzsche ist aber in historischem Irrtum von grober Art 
befangen, wenn er dem Christentum die Wirkung zuschreibt 
dass es die mannliche Tuchtigkeit untergrabe, dass es aus dem 
Menschen ein Zahmes Haustier und Herdentier gemacht 
habe. . . . 

"Aber auch wenn man das Barbarische ausser Acht lasst, so 
hat sich das christliche Ideal mit dem einer edlen Mannlichkeit, 
mit dem ritterlichen Ideal, nicht allein vertragen, sondern aufs 
Innigste vermahlt." (Tonnies, Der Nietzsche- Kultus, 91.) 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 127 

as explosion. Yet it is equally great as 
containing. The first lesson of courage is 
doubtless yea-saying to life; not to shrink; 
not to stop development because of dan- 
gers or fatigues; to face the unknown; 
to be adventurous, and so forth. Equally 
needful and harder to teach is the lesson 
of no-saying, i. e., to concentrate, to limit 
oneself, to hold oneself in; to control the 
desire to be always on the move. Even 
Napoleon, Nietzsche's great idol, used to 
talk of the importance of savoir se homer. 
Nietzsche introduced an opposition where 
none really exists between yea-saying and 
no-saying to impulses. Every yielding to 
impulses presents itself to the mind as 
yea-saying. Yet no one would be quicker 
than Nietzsche to assert that mere yield- 
ing to impulse would produce not the 
superman but the decadent. The point 
is whether or no we are to select between 
acts, some which we commend, others 
which we contemn. Both Christianity 
and Nietzsche say that we are. It is true 



128 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

that to the strong character the element 
of no-saying will be harder than to the 
weak. Most of us know men of strong 
character, the beauty of which consists 
not in the hardness which they have by 
an inherited gift, but in the refinement and 
self-denial by which it is tempered to 
noble ends. "Be hard," as Nietzsche 
preached, is by no means bad advice to 
people naturally soft. Tendencies in our 
age there are which such words might at- 
tack. But the opposite maxim, Be gentle, 
is even more needful, or civilisation will 
lose its most delicate blooms. Nietzsche 
himself would be the first to deplore this. 
The sentimentalism of "beautiful souls" 
against which Nietzsche protested may 
have been evil, but Nietzsche, who felt 
in himself the dangers of sentimentalism, 
is entirely one-sided in the way in which 
he preaches force and nothing but force. 
Nor can any process of interpretation rid 
him of this violence of overemphasis. 1 

1 "La sua filosofia e stata da capo a fondo la confessione e la 
proiezione della debolezza della sua vita." (Giovanni Papini, II 
Crepuscolo del Filosofi, 233.) 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 129 

2. Nietzsche made a second error in 
regard to Christianity. He treated it as 
inculcating pure altruism. This the Chris- 
tian ethic never was and never will be. 
It teaches us to love our neighbour as our- 
self. It does not teach that the individual 
is entirely to be merged in the group. From 
this it is saved by its doctrine of individual- 
ity, 1 which asserts that every man has a 
special, value and meaning of his own: 
44 One star differeth from another star in 
glory — so also is it in the resurrection of 
the dead." Nietzsche saw that it was 
vain to expect to maintain the Christian 
values, after Christian supernaturalism is 
surrendered. He failed to see that Comtism 
and other purely humanitarian schemes, 
although Christian in their provenance, 
are only partially Christian in their ethics 
and omit certain indispensable elements 
of the Christian canons of conduct. Nor 

1 "Nietzsche Ubersieht im Christenthum vollig diese Zustiitzung 
zu dem Eigenwerte der Seele, in dem er das Christliche Wertgef iihl 
ausschliesslich in den Altruismus verlegt. Nicht auf den, dem 
gegeben wird, sondern auf den, der gibt, nicht auf den, fur den 
gelebt wird, sondern auf den, der lebt, kommt es Jesus an." 
(Simmel, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche, 200.) 



130 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

again does Christianity make all Love 
consist in sympathy. That is another 
mistake due to Schopenhauer, alles Lieb 
ist Mitleid. Nietzsche somewhere com- 
plains that religion nowadays means noth- 
ing more nor less than sympathy with 
suffering. Naturally enough he attacked 
the habit of making material comfort the 
one idol and the only test of development. 
But Christians do not do this. Often, 
indeed, they are blamed because they seem 
callous to much unmerited suffering (as 
even at this moment they are blamed be- 
cause they refuse to assert that all war is 
always to be condemned). Christianity 
must be judged by its own ideals, not by 
the dreams of sentimental rationalists, who 
deck themselves out in Christian colours. 

In matters like the marriage law and 
the limits of the Christian society, and 
the need of principle, Churchmen are 
frequently attacked because they refuse 
to allow sentimental sympathy to be the 
sole arbiter, and decline to identify the 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 131 

Holiness of God with the weak good 
nature of a parent who spoils his sons. It 
is hard to understand how any one not 
wholly ignorant of Christian life could 
have made such a charge. 

3. The same may be said of the attack 
on Christianity as hostile to culture. Like 
many other classical scholars, Nietzsche 
was ignorant of the Middle Ages. Yet 
he was familiar with Venice, and must 
have seen the great pictures of Italy, al- 
though it does not appear that he cared 
for painting. 1 How could a man who had 
once seen St. Mark's at Venice or St. 
Ambrogio at Milan declare with any sin- 
cerity that Christianity was always, and 
through its whole course of set purpose, 
hostile to culture? Doubtless he might 
say that the great painters of the Renais- 
sance were not truly Christians. He does 
say so of Raphael. That may be true 

1 " Selten habe ich Vergniigen an einer bildnerischen Darstel- 
lung, aber dieses Bild, 'Ritter, Tod und Teufel,' steht mir nahe, 
ich kann kaum sagen wie." Nietzsche to Malwida von Meysen- 
bug. (Brief e, III, 2, 491.) 



132 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

partially of the later or high Renaissance. 
It is not true of Fra Angelico or Giotto 
or the primitives. Even Nietzsche could 
not have believed it to be true of Michel- 
angelo. Probably the noblest material 
treasure of mankind is the great Gothic 
cathedrals. That will to power, that ascend- 
ing energy of which he makes so much, 
has had nowhere larger expression than in 
Romanesque and Gothic architecture. Re- 
cently, Mr. March Phillips in the Works 
of Man has taught us to see in the Gothic 
essentially the expression of energy. He 
omits, indeed, a certain spiritual aspira- 
tion, yet it is none the less true that we 
have a spirit of power. 1 

Once more. The Christian Church does 
not accord any especial honour to the tame 
anaemic virtues. No truer typical Chris- 
tians can be found in history than Alfred 
the Great and St. Louis — or, though on a 

1 One of Nietzsche's more unbalanced admirers, Mr. A. M. 
Ludovici, is good enough to inform us that Gothic is no true art. 
Was this the notion of the Germans when they gave us the Kultur- 
lesson of the bonfire of Louvain? 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 133 

lower grade of character, Charlemagne. Or 
taking Churchmen in the technical sense, 
Gregory the Great, St. Bernard, Bishop 
Grossetete were not weaklings. Were the 
English to make a formal canonisation for 
the nineteenth century, it is almost cer- 
tain that their choice would fall on General 
Gordon. 

It is true that cowardice and indolence 
may keep certain natures of low vitality 
from active sins, while the greater a man's 
powers, the more chances he has of going 
wrong. Yet outside a few specialised 
circles, the Church cannot be said to 
honour the one-horse-power type of char- 
acter. Great characters, if they do more 
wrong, will do more right. The true type 
of active Christian is our King Edward I, 
with his motto Pactum serva, not ashamed 
to burst into tears before his people and 
own himself in the wrong. Our Lord him- 
self was blamed because he liked the society 
of harlots and collectors. Do we suppose 
that these people were tame cats ? I cannot 



134 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

help thinking that Nietzsche was in this 
respect led astray by the social antipathies 
of his highly respectable relatives at Naum- 
burg. The lay figure against which he tilts, 
in the character of the Christian ideal, is 
ludicrously untrue to reality. 

Lastly, it must be said that Nietzsche 
misconceived the Christian doctrine of 
equality before God. That doctrine as- 
serts that every soul has an eternal value, 
none is merely a thing, a tool. Nietzsche, 
it is true, would deny this, except for the 
few. But when he goes on to say that 
Christianity makes all souls equal, in the 
sense that it denies the aristocracy of 
character, he is asserting the direct con- 
trary of the fact. This alleged over- 
democratic character of Christianity is 
not there. In its doctrine of the saints, it 
asserts clearly definite degrees and carries 
them beyond this life. Further, it goes on 
to say that what matters is the whole per- 
sonality. That, indeed, sometimes under- 
goes a cataclysmic change in the process 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 135 

we call conversion. But this is not uni- 
versal. The point is that neither on 
earth nor beyond it does Christianity 
deny the "aristocracy of character" — al- 
though it has never, like Nietzsche, as- 
serted its right to tyrannise in virtue of 
superiority. 

Nietzsche charges against the Christian 
Church all the developments of the modern 
democratic ideal. I would that more of 
these developments were chargeable there- 
to. Yet even socialism he appears to have 
misunderstood. 1 Socialism is a means to 
an end : it demands no more than equality of 
opportunity; it does not assert identity of 
gifts for every man. Nietzsche, doubtless, is 
opposed alike to socialism and to individual- 
ism, because they each assert the worth of 
every individual and merely differ in the 
means whereby they promote it. But it 
is not true to assert, as Nietzsche does, 
that either asserts or even implies that all 



1 "Nietzsche probably misunderstood the inmost meaning of 
democracy." (Wolf, The Philosophy of Nietzsche.) 



136 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

men are of equal power. A few extreme 
democrats may do this, just as a few ex- 
tremists may deny any select moments 
or epochs in history. But such a charge 
is contrary to fact in regard to nearly all 
believers in democracy, whether Chris- 
tian or not. Moreover, the Christian 
Church, in its sense of the sanctity of 
marriage and the unity of family life, has 
been and remains, sometimes almost in 
spite of itself, a chief barrier to that un- 
regulated individualism, "the mishmash of 
the mob," which Nietzsche condemns. 

Nietzsche says a great deal about "the 
pathos of distance," and is very anxious 
that the sense of difference, of distinction, 
between men shall increase. He would 
base all this upon a radical difference of 
nature, and, in so far as this is the case, 
Christianity would be opposed thereto. 
Once, however, admit the common human 
quality, i. e., capacity for choice and for God 
of every "even-Christian," and the Church 
will really operate, is operating now, in 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 137 

the direction which Nietzsche desired. This 
happens in more ways than one. First, 
the modern world is religiously hetero- 
geneous. Christians are but a part of 
it. More and more will the Christian 
tend to be separated by the fact of his 
Christianity — the words "a royal nation, 
a peculiar people" are bound to have a 
more immediate application, as the pres- 
sure of religious competition increases. 
Secondly, in the Christian ideal there is 
latent a certain Vornehmheit. Nietzsche 
never realised that it is the sinner who is 
always commonplace, the real saint who 
is the distinguished person. Nietzsche's 
beloved Borgia were vulgar enough; it 
was Michelangelo and Savonarola, Con- 
tarini and Pole who had true distinction. 
Most of us know some in whom the per- 
fection of Christian saintliness has reached 
that miracle of refinement. A certain 
dignity and detachment, a certain grace 
of holiness seems to attach to such natures, 
and they attain a charm given by nothing 



138 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

else; neither by high birth nor by high 
culture. Thirdly, Christianity asserts for 
every man a definite idea, a place in the 
Kingdom. None, it declares, there is, how- 
ever lowly, who has not in him something 
that is a beauty all his own. Nietzsche 
denies this, and asserts it only of the few; 
although he gives no criterion to distin- 
guish the classes. 

True, Christianity is a fellowship, a 
common life. It teaches that no one can 
reach his end in isolation. So did Nietzsche, 
however high the value he set upon lone- 
liness. The qualities he desiderates — power 
to command, a certain proud obedience, 
refinement, distinction of manner — can 
none of them be won except at the cost of 
a strong social discipline. His idea of 
Vornehmheit has no meaning whatever out 
of society. What he says of the need of 
severe schooling shews how well aware he 
is of the social element, even in the making 
of the superman. True, he appears to 
teach that, once his superman is made, he is 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 139 

free from all social restraints. Even this is 
doubtful; he would be restrained in his 
dealings with his peers, though not with 
the herd. 

Modern knowledge has shown that after 
all there is something in the idea of race, 
of good breeding, of family. This eugenic 
notion of a carefully prepared birth-issue, 
is what Nietzsche rested upon at the last. 
Nor is there anything in this (provided cer- 
tain safeguards are taken) which Chris- 
tianity need object to. The multiplication 
of the unfit — provided we know what are 
truly unfit — it is no concern of the Church 
to preserve; although it is concerned (un- 
like Nietzsche) for their proper treatment 
when once they are here. 

Even in politics the aspirations of the 
most ardent social reformers have passed 
away from that vast state, the "all too 
many," as fairy godmother, and are all 
in favour of groups as the only effective 
method of securing good co editions on a 
large scale. Such groups (even in a sys- 



140 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

tern of guild-socialism) will not be equal — 
a group of doctors or artists would be 
different in all its requirements from a 
group of engineers. Each will have its 
own place. The honour and austerity of 
its life and its dignity will be enhanced 
by the fact that hereditary influences are 
bound to have much influence in helping 
towards membership, as they do now. 

Even Nietzsche once admits that there 
is something common running through all 
men. Christianity teaches that the lowest 
of us is not too low to be redeemed by the 
blood of Christ, and that the noblest is 
not so high that he needs no forgiveness. 
In this we are diametrically opposed to 
Nietzsche, who would divide the world 
at birth into those who are and those 
who are not capable of rising above the 
herd; although even for the former dis- 
cipline is needed. We have seen, more- 
over, that Nietzsche was unconsciously 
Christian in his conception of the tragic na- 
ture of existence as against the facile opti- 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 141 

mism of Strauss and the Hegelians, in his 
sense that redemption is needed, and that 
this can come only by a "new creature." 

Further, there is something analogous to 
Christian thought even in Nietzsche's Be- 
yond Good and Evil. What that book at- 
tacks is the ethics of Kant and all other 
codifiers of the Categorical Imperative. 
Christianity is not a code, but a spirit. 
Love to God and to our neighbour is the 
principle. The ordinary rules of morals are 
merely formulae, which express the ap- 
plication of this principle under normal 
conditions. There are cases when they 
do not apply. That is the excuse for 
casuistry, which discusses all these cases 
on the edge. It is true, for instance, that 
necessity knows no law. Solus populi su- 
perna lex — is the motto for certain rare con- 
ditions which justify the disregard of all 
normal rules. The error of Machiavelli 
and all who follow him is that they raise 
cases of necessity into the normal rule of 
action. They are an instance of the mis- 



142 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

take of trying to legislate for hard cases. 1 
Nietzsche discerns the truth of the matter 
when he says that acts "done for love 
are beyond good and evil." Nietzsche's 
system, as practically applied, is wrong, 
for it would make normal what is meant 
to be exceptional. But it must be pointed 
out, that his polemic against conventional 
morality is less anti-Christian than he sup- 
poses, and that his error springs from the 
fallacy frequent in Germany of identify- 
ing Christian morality with the systems of 
some philosophers who are either not 
Christian at all, or else very partially so. 

It has appeared, then, that much of the 
attack of Nietzsche is due to misconcep- 
tion. Is it, then, the case that Nietzsche 
was, after all, only a Christian who had 
lost his way, 2 that his own system was, 

1 On the relation of Nietzsche to Machiavelli, qf. Caffi's Nietzsches 
Stellung zu Machiavellis Lehre. 

1 have said something on this topic in From Gerson to Grotius, 
chap. DI. 

2 " II Nietzsche, invece, era nel f ondo un' anima assai cristiana 
e non ingiustamente e stato chiamato da qualcuno un 'prete de- 
cadente.' L'ideale del superuomo corrisponde un poco a quello 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 143 

had he but understood it better, the same 
thing so far as rules of conduct went? 
No. True, some like Mr. Stephen Graham 
may say that Nietzsche was on his way to 
become a transcendent Christian. That 
may be, for he was always changing. But 
it is unlikely, unless his view of the non- 
existence of the supernatural had altered. 
We must take him as he wrote. Had he 
not gone mad, he might have become 
saner. It is true, also, that Nietzsche's 
ideas have very much more affinity with 
the truly Christian conception of life 
than had the moral ideas of Strauss or of 
any other of the Pantheistic philosophers 
whom he superseded. It is true, also, 
that his attitude to life is at bottom mys- 
tical. He sees that man as he is is not a 
beautiful sight. He sees the wickedness 

del Cristo — Taccettazione del male corresponde all cristiana 
accettazione del dolore — il sacrifizio degli inferiori alia futura 
vita superiore, al sacrifizio della vita attuale per la beatitudine 
della vita futura. I superuomini somigliano oltre che ai guardiani 
della repubblica platonica, anche ai monaci soldati, ai Templari 
o ai cavalieri di Malta, e il Nietzsche e arrivato a scrivere che 
'chi vuol impiegare il suo denaro da spirito libero deve fondare 
istituti sul tipo dei conventi.'" (Papini, 254.) 



144 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

of pessimism. Pessimism, the nay-saying 
to life, is ten thousand times more wicked 
than all the variegated blasphemies of 
Nietzsche. Man can be saved only by 
becoming changed in his nature. That is 
the Christian doctrine of grace. Nietzsche 
is nearer to this than are those who preach 
a dogma of inevitable progress or those who 
deny sin. Sin Nietzsche admits practically, 
though not theoretically; it is the instinct 
of decadence. Also, when Nietzsche talks 
of the rarity of the higher man, he is more 
like Christianity than those who teach 
the contrary. Christians are, and are 
likely to be, a minority. Only persecution 
or its results have obscured that fact. We 
are not yet rid of the confusion between 
Christianity and citizenship. Distinction, 
further, is the outward and visible sign of 
an invisible grace, the sacrament of per- 
sonality — it depends on a consecrated will. 
It is a will consecrated to God that marks 
the Christian, not emotion or knowledge. 
In his insistence on the will and its train- 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 145 

ing Nietzsche is in harmony with Chris- 
tianity and with the characteristic Eng- 
lish conception of education. Even the 
ideal of the superman enshrines the truth 
that individuality or group distinction has 
its own quality, and that man is of worth, 
through something inherent and inalien- 
able in himself. 1 All forms of Christianity 
admit this, except the heresies which are 
toppling into Pantheism. Nietzsche's ha- 
tred of equality in the sense in which he gives 
it is not belied by Christian sentiment. 
His idealisation of heroism — his use of 
suffering, the religion of valour — is only 
the ancient doctrine of the Cross taught 
by Jesus Christ, palpitating in St. Paul 
and the whole New Testament. Even 



1 " Der christliche Altruismus, so fern er dem Kraft- und Ent- 
wicklungsideal Nietzsches stent, teilt mit ihm doch den Gegen- 
satz gegen alle in engerem Sinne bloss moralische und soziale 
Idealbildung; nicht in der altruistischen Handlung als solcher, 
sondern in der Heiligung und Seligkeit der Seele, die deren Innen- 
seite bildet, liegt der abschliessende Wert." (Simmel, 202.) Cf. 
also a little earlier. 

" Wenn der reiche Jiingling sein Gut an die Armen verschen- 
ken soil, so ist das keine Anweisung zum Almosengeben, sondern 
ein Mittel und Zeichen der Vollendung und Befreiung der Seele." 
(Simmel, 201.) 



146 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

what he says of the barbaric virtues, his 
new commandment, "Be hard," might per- 
haps be interpreted as little more than a 
warning against that pity which is born 
of cowardice, or that sympathy which is 
a form of luxury. All this may be said. 
Also it is added that Nietzsche is care- 
ful to distinguish Christianity from its 
Founder. He is the author of the saying 
that there has been only one Christian, 
and he died upon the Cross. This quali- 
fication, however, is but a slight one. 
All that can be said is that the venom 
which we note in his attack on St. Paul 
and the New Testament is less apparent 
in his words about Jesus of Nazareth. 
One or two places show a certain rever- 
ence. In the main, however, he treats 
Him with contempt. Jesus is to him a 
decadent, a madman (curiously enough, 
Nietzsche attacks others for the idiosyn- 
crasies of his own temperament). He had 
the melancholy of an ill-nourished person: 
was the most ill-natured of all men, suf- 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 147 

fering from a lunatic pride, which took 
delight in humility. 1 He died for His own 
guilt. He led an indefensible revolt. The 
sermon on the mount is not spoken from 
an elevated standpoint. The distinctive 
note of Jesus is His hatred of all actuality. 
Nietzsche wishes Dostoieffsky could have 
described the world of morbid unreality in 
which Jesus lived, and written the life "of 
this most interesting decadent." He sums 
up at the close of Ecce Homo: "Have you 
understood me, Dionysos or Christ?" 

Had Nietzsche corrected those miscon- 
ceptions of which I spoke, his ideal of con- 
duct would still remain fundamentally an- 
tagonistic to the Christian. Nor need one 
be so cruel as to tear from his melancholy 

1 "Jesus mit der Melancholie der schlechten Ernahrung. 

"Jesus: will dass man an ihn glaubt, und schickt Alles in die 
Holle was widerstrebt. Arme, Dumme, Kranke, Weiber, Kinder, 
eingerechnet Huren und Gesindel von ihm bevorzugt: unter ihnen 
fuhlt er sich wohl. Das Gefuhl des Richtens gegen alles Scheme, 
Reiche, Machtige, der Hass gegen die Lachenden. Die Giite 
mit ihrem grossten Contrast in einer Seele; es war der boseste 
aller Menschen. Ohne irgend welche psychologische Billigkeit. 
Der wahnsinnige Stolz, welcher die feinste Lust an der Demuth 
hat." (Werke, XIII, 305.) 

" Man verkenne doch ja nicht den tiefen Mangel an Noblesse 
des Gefiihls in Christus." 



148 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

brows that laurel-wreath which he himself 
had placed thereon — the title of Antichrist. 1 
The cardinal objection is this: Nietzsche 
sets before us the ideal of redemption by 
the superman. The whole point, then, is 
what content he pours into this vague 
and plastic conception. Nietzsche's ideal 
is essentially anti-Christian. It is based 
on the notion of pride. Not only is it 
anti- Christian; the superman, as Nietzsche 
preaches him, is inexpressibly vulgar. The 
notion of force without any direction — 
for he says repeatedly that life has no 
meaning or goal — would ultimately be no 
less destructive of the culture which 
Nietzsche desired. As Doctor Tonnies 
points out in his little book Der Nietzsche- 
Kultus, all the highest culture in the world 
comes from treating men as bound in 
fellowship, not from mere tyrannic pride. 2 

1 "Wollen Sie einen neuen Namen fiir mich? Die Kirchen- 
sprache hat einen: ich bin . . . der Antichrist." Nietzsche to 
Malwida von Meysenbug. (Briefe, III, 603.) 

2 "Alle edlere, geistige Kultur, alles 'hohere' Menschensein 
hat bisher noch — auch im 'klassischen Altertum' — auf der breiten 
Basis gesunden Bauer- und Biirgertums sich erhoben. Die sys- 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 149 

The Renaissance was noble, in so far as 
it worked upon the heritage of the Middle 
Ages. When it became purely pagan, it 
ceased to be interesting and lost refinement. 
It may be said that Nietzsche qualifies 
his cult of power with his cult of what is 
distinguished. True — but what does he 
mean by that? We can judge from the 
persons he cites with most frequent admira- 
tion. The Roman Empire, of which the 
very essence is "that river of cruelty" 
which according to Mommsen ran through 
it in its relations to slavery: and that in 
contradistinction to the Christian Church, 
which would assuredly suffer a worse per- 
secution, if Nietzsche's ideals were ever to 
be really triumphant. He takes names: 
Napoleon, and above all Cesare Borgia. 
Now, we know pretty well the kind of man 
Cesare was. The murder of the generals 
at Sinigaglia under a safe-conduct, of his 

tematische und massenhafte Sklavenwirtschaft war fur die antlke 
Kultur ebenso ein Ende wie fiir die moderne die systematische 
und massenhafte Proletarisierung des Volkes." (Tonnies, Der 
Nietzscke-Kultus, 105.) 



150 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

brother the Duke of Gandia, his mixture 
of vulgarity and skill are familiar to all. It 
is vain to say that Nietzsche did not want 
these people now. They are the kind he 
admired. His private letters to Peter Gast 
and Georg Brandes make it even more 
patent. Did Cesare Borgia advance culture 
as much as a contemporary like Dean Colet ? 
Nietzsche's theory is at bottom a denial 
of rights to the mass of men. It is a pro- 
test carried to its utmost limits against the 
maxim: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me 
alienum puto." Cicero's constant appeal 
to humanitas would be anathema to 
Nietzsche. The will to power, if that be 
all reality, must perforce treat all else as 
tools. The will to freedom is in essence 
Christian, for it recognises in others what 
it claims for itself. To Nietzsche, with all 
outlook on the other world denied, men in 
the mass are no more than living beings, 
to be the instrument of the strong man's 
lust. The Putumayo atrocities, and others 
more recent which we need not cite, are 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 151 

in accord with his teaching. An author 
must be judged, not by the actions which he 
directly enjoins, but by the kind of spirit 
which will naturally come of following 
on his lines. Nietzsche need not be held 
to have wished many of the things which 
have happened. Yet they may be the nat- 
ural outcome of his prophecies. 

The system of Nietzsche is shattered 
upon the rock of facts, just as ultimately 
were the great slave empires of the past. 
All are founded on a lie. Mr. Paterson 
in his Nemesis of Nations has shown how 
one after another empires have risen and 
decayed through this very cause, that 
they treated the vast mass as mere tools, 
"chattels," as the law said. This is a lie. 
Treat human beings as machines as much 
as you will, the fact remains that they are 
incurably personal. Ultimately this truth 
is destructive of the proudest tyranny, 
though it may last a thousand years. 

The passion and the pride of man are 
for ever trying to loose all bonds, and to 



152 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

enslave others to their will. It is a grave 
question whether that is not the real pur- 
pose of modern capitalism. Those who 
are forward to condemn Nietzsche should 
ask themselves how far they allow them- 
selves to be ruled by a like idea, how far 
they are content to build their own devel- 
opment, their culture and high tastes, and 
even their religion upon the services of 
masses of men — of whom they think as so 
much machinery. We cannot in this or 
any other form of society be free of using 
the services of others. The point is, how do 
we regard those who help us ? The culture, 
which is founded even in theory on the 
denial of all share in it to the common 
people, may for a time be brilliant; but it 
lacks that freedom which is of the essence 
of all living art. A society whose root- 
notion is pride, which looks on the rest as 
though in the slang phrase they "do not 
really exist," will in the long run develop 
grosser corruptions. This is said to be the 
cause of the decadence of Greece. Its art 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 153 

became hedonist, and thereupon sensuality 
ruled. Or else its aristocrats will become so 
highly refined that the sight of the ugli- 
ness of the life of the masses fills them with 
horror, and they seek to remedy it. This 
will be the case, even if "the pathos of dis- 
tance" be mainly intellectual. 

Some defenders of Nietzsche have argued 
that in no real sense does he desire a tyranny 
of masters, like that of the ancient world, 
that his words about war refer only to 
warfare of ideas, and that he had no sym- 
pathy with the present plutocratic oli- 
garchy. This may be true. It is irrele- 
vant to the consideration of the meaning 
of his substitute for the good tidings 
preached to the poor. Nietzsche's moral 
system is the apotheosis of pride. His 
own feeling that he was of a different 
rank to other men, that Zarathustra was 
more wonderful than Faust or the Divina 
Commedia; 1 his words about Wagner and 

1 "If all the spirit and goodness of every great soul were collected 
together, the whole could not create a single one of Zarathustra's 
discourses." (Ecce Homo, 106.) 



154 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

many other expressions are evidence for 
this megalomania. This was the oncoming 
of disease. Yet it translates itself into 
his ethical doctrine. As he claimed him- 
self, his philosophy is eminently personal. 
However much Nietzsche's wildness be 
trimmed, his effect would be to endow the 
"superior person," out of whose loins the 
superman shall come, with a sense of cold 
aloofness from the rest of mankind, and 
to destroy all sense of duty towards them. 
Nietzsche admits this. 

Nietzsche's gentle and delicate nature 
is often pleaded in extenuation. The 
truth remains that his doctrine is, what 
it professes to be, a philosophy of force and 
nothing but force, that it is certain to 
stimulate that pride from which tyranny 
comes in its disciples, and that it ministers 
to the worst prejudice of cultivated men, 
that other people are of no account. 

Striking resemblances are to be found 
between the doctrine of the Will to Power 
of Nietzsche and the Elan vital of Berg- 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 155 

son. 1 But there is all the difference in that 
one makes freedom the aim^of development, 
and the other power. For faith in freedom 
means ultimately the belief in the reality of 
spiritual forces other than oneself, and the 
will to power means its denial. 2 Nietzsche 
rejoices in that his superman will seem to 
Christian moralists a devil. That must 
be so, if pride and force be the only ideal — 
even if one exclude physical force. The 
great noon of the world will come, if it 
ever comes, not when a modern Borgia 
wreaks his will upon the weak; but when 
pride itself becomes humble, when the lofty 
looks are cast low, not from without but 
from within, when real freedom is recog- 
nised for all. 

That Nietzsche's antagonism to Chris- 
tian ideals was more radical than any 
theological hostility was his boast in a 
letter to his mother. His dubbing the 

1 This is seen in certain arguments, e. g., the Calvinistic, drawn 
from the Omnipotence of God when he is conceived as earthly- 
autocrat. 

2 Cf. on this point Caffi, op. cit. 



156 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

three graces, Faith, Hope, and Charity, 
as the three Christian dodges is evidence of 
this. His view of the primitive Christian 
community as described in the New Testa- 
ment goes farther. Let me quote what 
he says: 

"One does well to put on gloves when 
reading the New Testament. The prox- 
imity of so much uncleanliness almost 
compels one to do so. We should as 
little choose 'first Christians' for com- 
panionship as Polish Jews. . . . Neither 
of them have a good smell. I have 
searched in vain in the New Testament 
for even a single sympathetic tract. 
There is nothing in it free, gracious, 
open-hearted, upright. Humanity has 
not yet made its beginning here — the 
instincts of cleanliness are lacking. . . . 
There are only bad instincts in the New 
Testament, there is no courage even 
for those bad instincts. All in it is 
cowardice, all is shutting of the eyes 



NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 157 

and self-deception. Every book becomes 
cleanly, when one has just read the New 
Testament. To give an example, imme- 
diately after Paul, I read with delight 
Petronius, that most charming and wan- 
ton scoffer. . . . 

"Every expression in the mouth of 
a 'first Christian' is a lie, every action 
he does is an instinctive falsehood — all 
his values, all his aims are injurious, 
but he whom he hates, that which he 
hates, has value. . . . The Christian, the 
priestly Christian especially, is a crite- 
rion of values. Have I yet to say that 
in the whole New Testament only a single 
figure appears, which one is obliged to 
honour — Pilate, the Roman governor. To 
take a Jewish affair seriously, he will 
not be persuaded to do so. A Jew more 
or less — what does that matter? The 
noble scorn of a Roman before whom a 
shameless misuse of the word truth was 
carried on has enriched the New Testa- 
ment with the sole expression which 



158 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

has value — which is itself its criticism, 
its annihilation. What is truth?" 1 

Zarathustra is a "strong, spontaneous, 
adventurous individual." So, also, were 
St. Paul and St. Francis. High-hearted 
courage has always been a Christian vir- 
tue — the eagle's pride and the serpent's 
cunning with which Zarathustra conquers 
may win an audience in days when old 
bonds are broken. What is Nietzsche at 
his noblest as compared with that ideal 
which he contemns: "God is Love: and 
whoso dwelleth in Love, dwelleth in God. 
If a man love not his brother whom he 
hath seen, how can he love God whom he 
hath not seen?" 

1 Antichrist, 314, 316. 



IV 

NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 

Nothing is more characteristic of 
Nietzsche than his claim to be original. 
It is the creator of new values who is the 
real revolutionary, he says. He is essen- 
tially apocalyptic, and believes his power 
to be that of inspiration. He gives us an 
account of this, marred in its self-admira- 
tion by no false modesty. Even the titles 
of his books betray this apocalyptic spirit, 
The Dawn of Day, The Twilight of the 
Idols. It is well to have before us some 
of these passages. For Nietzsche can 
be judged only by himself. Books about 
him crystallise into death the flaming 
soul, which speaks in them: 

"Has any one at the end of the nine- 
teenth century any distinct notion of 
what poets of a stronger age understood 

159 



160 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

by the word inspiration? If not, I 
will describe it. If one had the smallest 
vestige of superstition left in one, it 
would hardly be possible completely to 
set aside the idea that one is the mere 
incarnation, mouthpiece, or medium of 
an almighty power. The idea of rev- 
elation in the sense that something 
which profoundly convulses and upsets 
one becomes suddenly visible and audi- 
ble with indescribable certainty and 
accuracy describes the simple fact. One 
hears — one does not seek — one takes — 
one does not ask who gives: a thought 
suddenly flashes up like lightning, it 
comes with necessity, without faltering. 
I have never had any choice in the mat- 
ter. There is an ecstasy so great that 
the universe strains, it is sometimes re- 
laxed by a flood of tears, during which 
one's steps now involuntarily rush and 
now involuntarily lag. There is the 
feeling that one is utterly out of hand 
with the very distinct consciousness of 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 161 

an endless number of fine thrills and 
titillations descending to one's very toes; 
there is a depth of happiness in which 
the most painful and gloomy parts do 
not act as antitheses to the rest, but 
are produced and acquired as necessary 
shades of colour in such an overflow of 
light. There is an instinct for rhythmic 
relations which embraces a whole world 
of forms (length, the need of a wide- 
embracing rhythm, is almost the mea- 
sure of the force of an inspiration, a sort 
of counterpart to its pressure and ten- 
sion). Everything happens quite invol- 
untarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst 
of freedom, of absoluteness of power 
and divinity. The involuntary nature 
of the figures and similes is the most 
remarkable thing; one loses all percep- 
tion of what is imagery and metaphor; 
everything seems to present itself as 
the readiest, truest, and simplest means 
of expression. It actually seems, to use 
one of Zarathustra's own phrases, as if 



162 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

all things came to one and offered them- 
selves as similes. ('Here do all things 
come caressingly to thy discourse and 
flatter thee, for they would fain ride 
upon thy back. On every simile thou 
ridest here into every truth. Here fly 
open unto thee all the speech and word 
shrines of the world, here would all 
existence become speech, here would all 
Becoming learn of thee how to speak.') 
This is my experience of Inspiration. I 
do not doubt that I should have to go back 
thousands of years before I could find an- 
other, who could say truly, It is mine al- 
so." l 

"This work stands alone. Do not let 
us mention the poets in the same breath. 
Nothing perhaps has ever been produced 
out of such a superabundance of strength. 
My concept 'Dionysian' here becomes 
the highest deed; compared with it, 
everything that other men have done 
seems poor and limited. The fact that 

1 Ecce Homo, 101. 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 163 

a Goethe or a Shakespeare would not 
for an instant have known how to take 
breath in this atmosphere of poison and 
the heights, the fact that by the side of 
Zarathustra, Dante is no more than a 
believer, and not one who first creates 
the truth — that is to say not a world- 
ruling spirit, a fate; the fact that the 
poets of the Veda were priests and not 
even fit to unfasten Zarathustra's san- 
dal—all this is the least of things and 
gives no idea of the distance, of the 
azure solitude in which this work dwells. 
... If all the spirit and goodness of 
every great soul were collated together, 
the whole could not create a single one 
of Zarathustra's discourses. . . . Until 
his coming no one knew what was height 
or depth and still less what was truth. 
There is not a single passage in this 
revelation of truth which had already 
been anticipated and divined by even 
the greatest of men. Before Zarathus- 
tra there was no wisdom, no prov- 



164 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

ing of the soul, no art of speech; in 
his book, the most familiar and most 
vulgar thing utters unheard-of words. 
The sentence quivers with passion. Elo- 
quence has become music. Forks of 
lightning are hurled towards futures of 
which no one has ever dreamed before. 
The most powerful use of parables that 
has yet existed is poor beside it, and 
mere child's play compared with this 
return of language to the nature of 
imagery." * 

One more passage, and that from Zara- 
thustra, must be cited. This will give a 
good notion of Nietzsche in his apocalyptic 
robes of ceremony: 

"False shores and false securities ye 
were taught by the good. In the lies 
of the good ye were born and hidden. 
Through the good everything hath be- 
come deceitful and crooked from the 
bottom. 

1 Ibid., 106. 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 165 

"But he who discovered the land 'man,' 
discovered also the land 'human future.' 
Now ye shall be unto me sailors, brave, 
patient ones ! 

"Walk upright in time, O my brethren, 
learn how to walk upright ! The sea 
stormeth. Many wish to raise them- 
selves with your help. 

"The sea stormeth. Everything is in 
the sea. Up ! Upward ! Ye old sailor 
hearts ! 

"What? A fatherland? Thither striv- 
eth our rudder, where our children's 
land is. Out thither, stormier than the 
sea, our great longing stormeth ! 

" 'Why so hard?' said once the char- 
coal unto the diamond, 'are we not near 
relations ? ' 

"Why so soft? O my brethren, thus 
I ask you. Are ye not — my brethren ? 

"Why so soft, so unresisting, and 
yielding? Why is there so much dis- 
avowal and abnegation in your hearts? 
Why is there so little fate in your looks ? 



166 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

"And if ye are unwilling to be fates., 
and inexorable, how could ye conquer 
with me some day ? 

"And if your hardness would not 
glance, and cut, and chip into pieces — 
how could ye create with me some day ? 

"For all creators are hard. And it 
must seem blessedness unto you to press 
your hand upon millenniums as upon 
wax 

"Blessedness to write upon the will 
of millenniums as upon brass — harder 
than brass, nobler than brass. The 
noblest only is perfectly hard. 

"This new table, O my brethren, I 
put over you: ' Become hard !' l 

"But what say I where no one hath 
mine ears ! Here it is still an hour too 
early for me. 

"Mine own forerunner I am among 
these folk, mine own cockcrow through 
dark lanes. 

"But their hour will come ! And mine 
will come also ! Every hour they be- 

1 Zarathustra, 318-319. 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 167 

come smaller, poorer, less fertile. Poor 
pot-herbs ! Poor soil ! 

"And soon shall they stand there like 
dry grass and prairie, and, verily, wearied 
of themselves — and longing for fire more 
than for water ! 

"Oh, blessed hour of lightning! Oh, 
secret of the forenoon ! Running fires 
shall I one day make out of them and 
announcers with fiery tongues. 

"Announce shall they one day with 
fiery tongues: 'It cometh, it is nigh, the 
great noon!' "* 

"But I and my fate, we speak not 
unto To-day. Nor do we speak unto 
Never. For speaking we have patience 
and time and too much time. For one 
day it must come and will not be allowed 
to pass by. 

"Who must come one day and will 
not be allowed to pass by? Our great 
Hazar, i. e., our great far-off kingdom of 
man, the Zarathustra-kingdom of a thou- 
sand years." 2 

1 Ibid., 252-253. * Ibid., 353. 



168 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

The dithyrambic style of Nietzsche dis- 
guises the fact that this revelation is not 
really so new as he claims. The intensity 
and vividness with which he felt his own 
experience of this vision often blinded him 
to the amount of his indebtedness to others. 
His ever-present desire to be in reaction 
against his environment led him to sup- 
pose that his essays were more entirely 
unzeitgemasse than they were. Much of 
his effort is merely towards a revival — an 
anti-Gothic revival; classical, Pagan, Med- 
iterranean. Even despite his attack on 
the decadent Romanticism of the nineteenth 
century, Nietzsche is essentially a Roman- 
ticist. Much of his cult of the superman is 
the romantic cult of the genius. Signor 
Papini regards it as the chief sign of weak- 
ness in Nietzsche that he is unable ever 
to be authentically original. 1 Curious it 
is and worthy of note how much there is 
of recollection in his writing. Part of its 

1 "La prova phi inaspettata di questa fiachezza consiste, secondo 
me, nella sua incapacity ad essere veramente ed autenticamente 
originale." (Papini, op. cit., 232.) 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 169 

charm lies in its power to call up memories. 
His works are a veritable whispering gal- 
lery of literary echoes. Nietzsche, who 
condemns all second-hand culture, is em- 
inently literary. Machiavelli certainly and 
Gobineau probably have a good deal to 
do with his cult of Cesare Borgia. Doctor 
Thiele discerns in So Spake Zarathustra 
the strains of influence of many kinds of 
German literature in the nineteenth cen- 
tury. Great, also, is Nietzsche's debt to 
those Scriptures which he abhorred. The 
title of his autobiography Ecce Homo af- 
fords a striking instance of this. La Roche- 
foucauld is not obscurely his chosen model 
in his aphoristic vein — although for the 
main part his aphorisms have not the 
rapier-point of the great aristocrat. It 
would be a good exercise in literary culture 
to trace through Nietzsche's writings all 
the various influences which moulded him 
and are reflected in his style. What Herr 
von Biilow said of his music and its rela- 
tion to Wagner might be said of many 



170 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

others of his productions in their literary 
provenance. 1 

All this does not seriously detract from 
the greatness of Nietzsche. Long since 
have we learned that the greatest literary 
genius may borrow as much as he likes, 
so long as he makes his takings his own, 
and transfuses all with the alembic of his 
own personality. Nietzsche does this in 
an eminent degree. No writer is more per- 
sonal. But he is not independent, despite 
all his dithyrambic praise of solitude. In 
spite of his hatred of sentimentalism, he 
is above all things a "man of feeling," 
and is moved not so much by a positive 
inherent power, as by irritation against 
some other person or writer. His relation 



1 Dbrner in his work Pessimismus, Nietzsche und Naturalismus 
has a very acute summary! of Nietzsche's position as a Romanticist. 
I quote a couple of passages: 

"Er spielt die antike Weltanschauung in mancher Beziehung 
gegen die Christliche aus. Auch da ist er Romantiker, er schaut 
seine Gedanken in die Vergangenheit, er nimmt was ihm passt 
aus der Antiken, vor allem nicht ihr Mass" (p. 112). 

"Kurz, Nietzsche verteilt eine Romantik des Lebensdranges, 
des Machteffektes, die auf der Herrschaft des Naturalismus der 
Zeit fusst und den Machttrieb vergottert, der die Zeit bestimmt " 
(p. 116). 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 171 

to Wagner is typical. He begins with 
friendship and adoration. These find lit- 
erary expression in The Birth of Tragedy 
and the Essays out of Season. When the 
friendship has become enmity, he cannot 
get the thought of Wagner out of his head, 
and develops his new principles in oppo- 
sition to him. Wagner and his wife, who 
is probably "Ariadne, 1 " count for a great 
deal in Nietzsche's later writing, even 
apart from those pages devoted to that 
topic. The same is true of his attitude to 
Christianity. 2 

Even his heroic moral attitude has at 
times something rhetorical. Nietzsche be- 
trays himself when, in order to prepare 
his readers for an attack on the New Testa- 
ment, he is forced to drag in a tag: "X 
can't help it. Like Luther, I say: 'Here 
I stand, I can do no other!" 5 This is 

1 Cf. Bernoulli, OverbecJc und Nietzsche, and also Belart's re- 
mark in Nietzsches Freundschafts-Tragodie. 

2 "Originalite disions-nous en parlant de l'animosite de notre 
penseur a l'egard de la morale chretienne; il faut s'empresser 
d'ajouter qu'il n'est guere original ici que par ses exces." (Seil- 
lieres, 210.) 



«/ 



172 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

eminently unspontaneous; very unlike 
Luther. 

The literary affinities of Nietzsche form 
too multifarious a topic to be treated here. 
Rather it is with his philosophic back- 
ground that this lecture will try to deal. 
Even then it will not be complete. In 
an interesting essay in the International 
Journal of Ethics, written some dozen years 
ago, M. Fouillee writes as follows: 

"Nietzsche has not that supreme orig- 
inality which he claims for himself. 
Mix Greek sophistry and Greek scep- 
ticism with the naturalism of Hobbes 
and the monism of Schopenhauer cor- 
rected with the paradoxes of Rousseau 
and of Diderot, and the result will be 
the philosophy of Zarathustra." ' 

And again: 

"He fancies himself secure from the 
prejudices which emanate from the 'herd' 

1 " The Ethics of Nietzsche and Guyau," A. Fouillee, Interna- 
tional Journal of Ethics, 1903, p. 13. 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 173 

or are due to environment, and yet no 
one more than this singer of the praises 
of force and of war has gathered together 
into a single heap all the gregarious 
prejudices from Germany still feudal in 
the midst of the nineteenth century, all 
those dominant ideas which spring from 
the race, the environment, and the mo- 
ment, and combined them with corre- 
sponding ideas from antiquity, the Mid- 
dle Ages, and the Renaissance." * 

We shall not be able to enter into all 
the questions aroused by this passage. 
But it may be worth while to take in turn 
Nietzsche's relation to certain writers, from 
whom he believed himself to be wide apart 
as the poles. 2 In many cases that differ- 
ence was real, yet he owed more to them 
than he suspected. Having considered these 
cases, we will pass to another writer, who 

1 Ibid., p. 17. 

2 The extraordinary originality which enthusiastic Nietzscheites 
found in his writings is mainly due to their own unfamiliarity 
with the history of philosophy. (Wolf, The Philosophy of Nietzsche, 
28.) 



174 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

is usually credited with having been partly 
the inspirer of Nietzsche, or if not that, a 
more logical and thoroughgoing exponent 
of the same doctrine, Max Stirner, the 
author of Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum. 
In this case I believe that the opinion is 
not justified, and that Nietzsche, even if 
he had read Stirner, derived little or noth- 
ing from him. Nor would either have ap- 
proved the other. 

It may be well to say a few words about 
the course which is best to take in order 
to arrive at a comprehension of Nietzsche. 
For the purposes of literary appreciation 
some of his earliest books, such as the 
Birth of Tragedy and the Future of our 
Educational Institutions; for a complete 
study all or nearly all must be read. For 
obtaining illuminating critical views about 
European culture, he may be opened al- 
most anywhere. But for those who desire 
quickly to know something of the Gospel 
of One Superman, his third or last period 
is alone of supreme importance. Nietzsche's 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 175 

course may be divided into three: the 
Schopenhauer-Wagner period, The Birth 
of Tragedy, and the Essays out of Season, 
etc. Then comes a period of intellectual- 
ism of which Human, All Too Human is 
the most important work; although the 
Joyful Wisdom and the Dawn of Day must 
be assigned rather to that than the suc- 
ceeding time. In Human, All Too Human 
Nietzsche wrote on the side of intellec- 
tualist, scientific methods, and was much 
under the influence of Paul Ree (although 
he did not admit this). In this time he 
was more purely sceptical than at any 
other; in his reaction against Wagner he 
sets the relation of art to science in pre- 
cisely the opposite light to that in which 
his earlier and his later works regard it. 
His sympathy for the English Darwinian 
schqol and the English psychologists is 
great, and is unlike his later (or earlier) 
attitude. The most misleading of all ways 
of reading Nietzsche is to regard anything 
said in Human, All Too Human as author- 



176 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

itative for his later and most characteristic 
stage. For instance, he uses expressions 
here which imply an attitude to war — 
which is at variance with all he says later. 
Wagner, to whom this book was sent, 
regarded it as a proof of mental weakness, 
declaring that he and his wife had already 
noticed traces of this during his visits to 
Triebschen. Had Nietzsche continued in 
the line of this book, there would have 
been little beyond his literary brilliance to 
distinguish him from many other posi- 
tivists. Nietzsche, as the apostle of the 
superman is to be read primarily in Also 
Sprach Zarathustra. This cryptic work 
needs a commentary, as Nietzsche him- 
self was aware. All the later works, Be- 
yond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of 
Morals, The Wagner Tracts, and above 
all the posthumous Will to Power and 
Ecce Homo and The Antichrist are to be 
used for this end. When we speak of the 
Nietzschean doctrine, it is of the Nietzsche 
of this last period that we speak. Nor 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 177 

can it be disproved by citations from the 
second period. 1 Books about Nietzsche 
are legion. SimmeFs Schopenhauer und 
Nietzsche is very illuminating. As a guide 
to the ordinary reader Doctor Miigge's 
work is of value. It contains an account 
of the life, an analysis of his works in order, 
and an attempt at appraisement which is 
neither partisan nor hostile. 

Emmanuel Kant, the philosopher of 
Konigsberg, is one of Nietzsche's most 
common targets. Nietzsche is never weary 
of mocking him. He makes puns on the 
name to his discredit. He treats the doc- 
trine of the Categorical Imperative as 
hypocrisy. He is contemptuous of Kant's 
Christian or semi-Christian attitude, of the 
value he sets on each individual, and so 
forth. He quarrels with his distinction be- 
tween phenomena and noumena. Nietzsche's 
phenomenalism is so radical that he denies 

1 This seems to me an error in Doctor Wolf on The Philosophy 
of Nietzsche. He cites passages from Human, All Too Human, as 
though they were decisive evidence in regard to Nietzsche's final 
doctrine. Miigge, Friedrich Nietzsche, describes the three periods. 



178 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

it to be phenomenalism, for that word im- 
plies a reality of which it is the appearance. 
These things and others in Kant are a target 
not merely for the general scorn in which 
Nietzsche holds German writing and Ger- 
man philosophy, but for special and pecu- 
liar mockery. Yet, Nietzsche not only 
owed a great deal to Kant, but in some 
respects he actually developed his doc- 
trine. 1 Kant is really the critic and the 
destroyer of rationalism. He shews rather 
the limits than the powers of the human 
reason. Further in his doctrine of the 
practical reason, he shews the regulative 
value of those ideas, God, Freedom, and 
Immortality, of which he denied the possi- 
bility of demonstration. The modern anti- 
intellectualist pragmatist movement in all 
its forms owes much to Kant. 

Nietzsche, it is needless to say, did not 
believe in the three great ideas of the 
Practical Reason as propounded by Kant. 

1 Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des Als Ob, 772, admits that Nietz- 
sche took much from Kant, though not from the Kant of the 
text-books. 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 179 

Yet the best and most influential part of 
his purely philosophic writing is his acute 
criticism of the rationalistic habit of mind. 
As he said in a letter to Brandes, he had 
arrived at a state in which he disliked 
dialectic and even the sense of grounds for 
an opinion. This is due not to his making 
up his mind apart from all reasoning, but 
to the way in which long brooding affects 
one. Arguments are considered on either 
side, but eventually there arises a unity, 
in which all seems clear. Then it seems 
silly and degrading to grope about for 
reasons now forgotten, when, besides, the 
conviction is so much more solid than the 
mere conclusion of an argument. 

To return to Nietzsche and his attack on 
logicians. The philosopher's trust in dia- 
lectic is, like everything else, merely a 
form of the will to power. His desire is 
to rule. So he asserts the superiority of 
that in which he is an adept. More than 
that, logic in itself, the whole method of 
the reasoning faculty, is without any ref- 



180 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

erence to reality. It is merely the outcome 
of the instinct to control. 

The object of science is to enslave na- 
ture. Truth is merely that form of il- 
lusion which enables one best to live. 
Logic, the cutting of the world into little 
bits, and treating it as machinery, is not 
even an elementary guide to reality. Even 
its ultimate principle, the necessity of in- 
ference, given certain premises, is dictated 
only by the will to power; e. g., it is fatigue, 
not love of knowledge, that drives us to 
seek unity — and reason is the principle of 
unity. Let me cite what Nietzsche says: 

"Logic is the attempt on our part'to 
understand the actual world according 
to a scheme of Being devised by our- 
selves; or, more exactly, it is our at- 
tempt at making the actual world more 
calculable and more susceptible to for- 
mulation, for our own purposes. . . . 

"In order to be able to think and to 
draw conclusions, it is necessary to 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 181 

acknowledge that which exists: logic only- 
deals with formulae for things which are 
constant. That is why this acknowl- 
edgment would not in the least prove 
reality: 'that which is' is part of our 
optics. The 'ego' regarded as Being 
(not affected by either Becoming or 
evolution.) 

"The assumed world of subject, sub- 
stance, ' reason,' etc., is necessary: an 
adjusting, simplifying, falsifying, arti- 
ficially separating power resides in us. 
'Truth' is the will to be master over the 
manifold sensations that reach conscious- 
ness; it is the will to classify phenomena 
according to definite categories. In this 
way we start out with a belief in the 
'true nature' of things (we regard phe- 
nomena as real.) * 

"Thus it is the highest degrees of ac- 
tivity which awaken belief in regard to 
the object, in regard to its 'reality.' The 
sensations of strength, struggle, and re- 

1 The Will to Power, II, p. 33. 



182 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

sistance convince the subject that there 
is something which is being resisted. 

"The criterion of truth lies in the 
enhancement of the feeling of power. 

"According to my way of thinking, 
'truth' does not necessarily mean the 
opposite of error, but, in the most fun- 
damental cases, merely the relation of 
different errors to each other; thus one 
error might be older, deeper than an- 
other, perhaps altogether ineradicable, 
one without which organic creatures 
like ourselves could not exist; whereas 
other errors might not tyrannise over 
us to that extent as conditions of ex- 
istence, but when measured according 
to the standard of those other 'tyrants,' 
could even be laid aside and 'refuted.' 

"Why should an irrefutable assump- 
tion necessarily be 'true'? This ques- 
tion may exasperate the logicians who 
limit things according to the limitations 
they find in themselves: but I have 
long since declared war with this lo- 
gician's optimism. 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 183 

"Everything simple is simply imag- 
inary, but not 'true.' That which is 
real and true is, however, neither a 
unity nor reducible to a unity. 1 

"Life is based on the hypothesis of a 
belief in stable and regularly recurring 
things; the mightier it is, the more vast 
must be the world of knowledge and 
the world called being. Logicising, ra- 
tionalising, and systematising are of as- 
sistance as means of existence. 

"Man projects his instinct of truth, 
his 'aim,' to a certain extent beyond 
himself, in the form of a metaphysical 
world of Being, a 'thing in itself,' a 
world already to hand. His requirements 
as a creator make him invent the world 
in which he works in advance; he antic- 
ipates it: this anticipation (this faith in 
truth) is his mainstay. 

"All phenomena, movement, Becom- 
ing, regarded as the establishment of 
relations of degree and of force, as a 
contest. . . . 

1 Ibid., p. 49. 



184 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

"As soon as we fancy that some one 
is responsible for the fact that we are 
thus and thus, etc. (God, Nature), and 
that we ascribe our existence, our hap- 
piness, our misery, our destiny, to that 
some one, we corrupt the innocence of 
Becoming for ourselves. We then have 
some one who wishes to attain to some- 
thing by means of us and with us. 

"The 'welfare of the individual' is 
just as fanciful as the 'welfare of the 
species': the first is not sacrificed to 
the last; seen from afar, the species is 
just as fluid as the individual. 'The 
"preservation of the species' is only a 
result of the growth of the species — that 
is to say, of the overcoming of the species 
on the road to a stronger kind." * 

This psychological attempt to explain 
the growth of intellect as a development of 
the will to power is not indeed conducted 
on the same fines as Kant's critique. It 

1 Ibid., p. 61. 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 185 

is more akin to those of Bergson and some 
of the Pragmatists. Like theirs, it is largely 
due to the notion of biological evolution, and 
the sense that intellect is itself a product of 
those physical forces which we see in nat- 
ural development. 

For all that, Nietzsche owed a great 
deal more to the work of Kant as a critic 
of intellectualism than he would have cared 
to admit. As Doctor Wolf puts it: "The 
main point of his theory of knowledge, I 
take it, was to bring out the human per- 
spective involved in all human knowledge 
— somewhat as Kant and others had done 
before him, only more so." 1 

1 The following passage is also pertinent: 

(Werke, XIII, 85, § 214) : " Die wissenschaf tliche Genauigkeit ist 
bei den oberflachlichsten Erscheinungen am ersten zu erreichen, 
also wo gezahlt, gerechnet, getastet, gesehen werden kann, wo 
Quantitaten constatiert werden konnen. Also die armseligsten 
Bereiche des Daseins sind zuerst fruchtbar angebaut worden. 
Die Forderung, Alles miisse mechanistisch erklart werden, ist 
der Instinct, als ob die werthvollsten und fundamentalsten Er- 
kenntnisse gerade am ersten gelungen waren: was eine Naivetat 
ist. Thatsachlich ist uns Alles, was gezahlt und begriffen werden 
kann, wenig werth; wo man nicht hinkommt mit dem 'Begreifen' 
das gilt uns als 'hoher.' Logik und Mechanik sind nur auf das 
oberflachlichste anwendbar: eigentlich nur eine Schema tisir- und 
Abkiirzungs-Kunst, eine Bewaltigung der Vielheit durch eine 
Kunst des Ausdrucks — kein 'Verstehen' sondern ein Bezeichnen 



186 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

Lastly, the "thing in itself," which 
Nietzsche so stoutly denied, was to a large 
extent restored by him. In one aspect, 
indeed, he is purely naturalistic. But like 
Schopenhauer, he believed in a force be- 
hind all phenomena, that "infinite and 
eternal energy" (in the words of another 
philosopher whom Nietzsche disliked), 
which he calls the will to power. Kuno 
Fischer long since gave grounds for sup- 
posing that Kant's "thing in itself" means 
and was intended by him to mean no less 
than Will. This view, if not precisely 
established, has much to say for itself. 
Nietzsche denied all metaphysical reality, 
yet it is not difficult to see that his will to 
power, if it is to have any meaning at- 
tached to it at all (and he always repudi- 
ated sheer materialism), is of the nature of 
a spiritual force — The will that can, 

Existent behind all laws, that made them and lo 
they are. 

zum Zweck der Verstandigung. Die Welt auf die Oberflache 
reducirt denken heisst: sie zunachst 'begreiflich' machen. 
" Logic und Mechanik beriihren nie die Ursachlichkeit." 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 187 

To take one instance in detail. Kant 
had pointed out that the uniformity of 
nature, natural laws, etc., were not eternal 
realities, properties of things in themselves; 
they merely depend on our way of seeing 
nature, they are the a priori condition of 
our experience. After saying that cosmo- 
logical proofs of God are purely regulative, 
he goes on: 

"All phenomena depend in the same 
way a priori on the understanding, and 
receive their formal possibility from it, 
as when looked upon as mere intuitions, 
they depend on sensibility and become 
possible through it, so far as their form 
is concerned. However exaggerated 
therefore and absurd it may sound, that 
the understanding is the source of the 
laws of nature, and of its formal unity, 
such a statement is nevertheless correct 
and in accordance with experience. . . . 

"The pure understanding is therefore 
the law of the synthetical unity of all 
phenomena, and this makes experience, 



188 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

as far as its form is concerned, for the 
first time possible." Kant, Critique of 
the Pure Reason, Max Miiller's transla- 
tion, pp. Ill, 112. 

Nietzsche's criticism of science is analo- 
gous, though different. Kant asks, how 
knowledge is possible, assuming that we 
have knowledge, at least of phenomena. 
Nietzsche asks, what does knowledge mean ? 
His answer is that knowledge has nothing 
to do with any so-called truth, but is 
merely the complex of intellectual formula?, 
by which that resourceful animal Man is 
able to increase his power. Scientific 
knowledge is not only not truth, but every 
single instrument of so-called knowledge 
is merely a convenient he — i. e., it begins 
by treating as static what is essentially 
dynamic and splitting up the continuum 
of life in flux into imaginary- substances. 
We are ever driven in the terrific whirl of 
becoming. The very beginnings of scientific 
method, which assumes a hard-and-fast 
multiplicity of beings, are a fiction. Truth 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 189 

is in Nietzsche's view that body of conve- 
nient lies that helps us to live more power- 
fully. 1 The object of science is to enslave 
the outward world, just as morals is that 
other body of lies necessary for the will to 
power of the majority, the oppressed classes, 
to move towards reconquest. 

Nietzsche gives us, then, a psychological 
account of scientific knowledge which is 
to set us free from fatalism. Kant gave 
a deductive account of the origin of knowl- 
edge, also designed to set us free. Both 
taught the regulative rather than the 
absolute value of the laws of nature and 
of the whole body of so-called knowledge. 2 

Let us pass to another case in which 
the disagreement was more violent, and 
the dependence even more obvious — that 

1 Nietzsche, Werke, XIII, 102, § 239: "Das Leben bejahen— 
das selber heisst die Luge bejahen. Also man kann nur mit 
einer absolut unmoralischen Denkweise leben." 

2 Fatalism in another sense is inherent in Nietzsche's system. 
How can there be freedom if the one force moving all reality is 
blind will to power ? No real choice is possible in Nietzsche's 
system, and he himself denies all moral responsibility, but it is 
freedom which he desires. 



190 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

of Schopenhauer. Nietzsche's relation to 
Schopenhauer is of capital importance in 
any study of him. The question of his 
debt to Kant is more academic. Nietzsche 
had, as we know, for a long time been an 
ardent disciple of Schopenhauer, and after- 
wards turned against him. As against any 
form of facile optimism he remained of 
the same opinion; but from the "tragic" 
standpoint, which is his final one, he as- 
serts, as we saw in the second lecture, 
that although the universe is a chaos, al- 
though life has no purpose — moral, intel- 
lectual, or artistic — although a blind will 
to power is the sole reality and involves 
suffering infinite, yet Life is still to be ac- 
cepted in its entirety, that any form of 
self-denial is a blasphemy against exis- 
tence, and that the notion of redemption 
from suffering, and therefore from exis- 
tence, is radically false. 1 Nietzsche does 

1 Nietzsche, WerJce, XIII, 90, §228: "Die eigentliche grosse 
Angst ist: die Welt hat Jceinen Sinn mehr. Inwiefern mit 'Gott' 
auch die bisherige Moral weggef alien [ist: sie hielten sich gegen- 
seitig." 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 191 

not teach that suffering as such is an end. 
Like Christianity, he asserts that pain and 
pleasure are alike irrelevant in pursuit of 
the main end, which is life and more 
abundant life, and that whichever we 
encounter, alike pain or pleasure, can be 
made the basis, if accepted, of a richer 
development. This doctrine is in direct 
opposition to that of Schopenhauer. The 
latter taught that the one reality is will, 
that the restlessness of will produces life, 
and with this as an inevitable consequence, 
suffering; that the only means of redemp- 
tion is by the will to love, i. e., pity — all love 
is pity — overcoming the will to live. Self- 
denial, therefore, in its literal sense, is the 
sole virtue. Ultimately, the whole conscious 
universe, which is the expression of the will 
to live, will sink back into an eternal 
Nothingness, after realising the mistake of 
existence. This doctrine appears an unre- 
lieved pessimism — although it may be to 
some extent counteracted by the fact that 
Schopenhauer did not approve suicide, and 



192 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

that he speaks with approval of the "mys- 
tical" death of Quietists like Madame Guy- 
on, and seems to leave a loophole for sup- 
posing that Nirvana means something other 
than actual annihilation. Still, Nietzsche is 
justified in treating the redemption by 
negation of Schopenhauer, as a no-saying 
to life. His opposition to this is radical, 
and it is justified. 

Yet Nietzsche was in error when he sup- 
posed that he had come out of the circle 
of Schopenhauer's influence. Both Scho- 
penhauer and Nietzsche teach a phi- 
losophy of the will. Along with Hart- 
mann, whom Nietzsche so deeply despised, 
they really rest on the unconscious and 
subconscious to the depreciation of the 
articulate elements in man. All three are 
alike anti-intellectualist, although in very 
different ways. Nietzsche is always psy- 
chological, the others are metaphysicians. 
Even allowing for the difference between 
the will to live and the will to power, it is 
not true to say that the systems are iden- 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 193 

tical. As Simmel points out, for Schopen- 
hauer Will is the reality behind the world, 
and will produces life. For Nietzsche life is 
the ultimate reality of which will to power is 
the expression. Schopenhauer would say: 
"I live, because I will"; Nietzsche: "I will, 
because I live." Practically, however, it 
remains true that both Schopenhauer and 
Nietzsche, and Hartmann along with them, 
teach a monism of Will, just as Hegel 
teaches a monism of thought. Both Hegel 
and Schopenhauer teach that the individual 
is an illusion, the manifestation under 
forms of time and space of an Absolute. 
Only Schopenhauer's Absolute is Will, 
Hegel's is the Idea, and is called Absolute. 
Nietzsche would deny that he believed in 
any Absolute. Now and then it would 
appear that his life force is so highly con- 
centrated in individuals, his theory of the 
world as a chaos is so thorough, that his 
individuals have more reality than those 
of either Schopenhauer or Hegel. Yet on 
the whole his philosophy is a monism with 



194 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

the individual as the mere bubble on the 
stream of the Will to Power. 

Nietzsche is not a pessimist in Schopen- 
hauer's sense; yet neither is he an optimist. 
His Amor Fati is a counsel of despair. In 
Schopenhauer's view the world is evil by 
the very fact of its existence. Will is in- 
satiable and restless. In producing the 
multifarious world in order to satisfy it- 
self, it is attempting the impossible. No 
peace for it is possible, until it sinks into 
Nirvana. On the whole, then, life is bad 
and redemption is possible only by its 
extinction. Nietzsche says that life has 
no meaning nor moral. Therefore we are 
to worship its ever-recurring monstrosity. 

Let us pass to another influence, which 
can be considered but briefly. Darwin 
comes in for much of Nietzsche's contempt 
(except in the Human, All Too Human 
period). The Darwinian hypothesis of a 
struggle for existence he regards as ab- 
surd, arising out of the phenomenon of 
an overpopulated island like England, 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 195 

where Darwin and Malthus were reared. 
Yet few writers owed more to Darwin. 
The influence of Darwin is the watershed 
that divides Schopenhauer's system from 
that of Nietzsche, which is essentially one 
of becoming. Nietzsche's conception of the 
world as physiological development only — 
his never-ceasing belief in evolution — even 
his belief in the struggle for power, as the 
key-word to all development, are really only 
Darwin with a difference. 1 Nietzsche's con- 
ception of the Will to Power does give a 
more plausible account of natural evolution 
than that of the struggle for existence. Yet 
clearly he got the former to a large extent 
out of the latter. Moreover, it is doubtful 
whether Nietzsche would have hit on the 
symbol Superman, had not his imagination 
been fired by the Origin of Species. 2 We can 

x "Toutes les consequences habituellement tirees du dar- 
winisme par les partisans de la force, surtout en Allemagne, nous 
les avons vues se developper chez Nietzsche. II est aristocrate 
et ennemi de la democratic comme tous les darwinistes qui veulent 
appliquer purement et simplement la loi darwinienne a la societe 
humaine." (Fouillee, 253.) 

2 Nietzcshe, Werke, XIV, 261: "Meine Forderung: Wesen 
hervorzubringen, welche iiber der ganzen Geltung 'Mensch' er- 
haben dastehn; und diesem Ziele sich und 'die Nachsten' zu 
opfern." 



196 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

see how much at one time this school at- 
tracted him by looking at the writings of 
his second period. M. Claire Bichter has 
written an interesting book on Nietzsche 
et les theories biologiques contemporaines, 
in which he seeks to show that Nietzsche 
was unconsciously a disciple of Lamarck 
rather than Darwin in certain important 
aspects of the doctrine of the transmuta- 
tion of species. This may be so, without 
it affecting the other fact, especially since 
M. Bichter admits that Nietzsche was un- 
conscious of his debt to Lamarck. The 
truth is that, in regard to Darwin, Nietz- 
sche went through his usual process. He 
read him, was strongly influenced, then be- 
gan to turn round and criticise. Finally he 
poured scorn on the whole school, and 
would have denied all affinity thereto. Dar- 
win's English quality was another draw- 
back. Nietzsche might despise German 
culture-Philistines, and go so far as to say 
that even the presence of a German retarded 
his digestion. Yet he despised the English 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 197 

even more heartily, and identified them 
with a narrow utilitarian commercialism 
and an equally pedestrial view in ethics. 

In this, as in many other ways, Nietzsche 
merely represented his own day in Ger- 
many. He was more German than he sup- 
posed. Doctor Georg Brandes, who has 
been called Vinventeur de Nietzsche, considers 
his whole system the translation into terms 
of ethics of the Bismarckian era. Bismarck, 
indeed, in his later years Nietzsche disliked 
and thought him corrupted by the struggle 
for power; while he declared that wherever 
Germany extended her sway she ruined 
culture. 1 Yet it is the Prussian officer- 
corps which had his admiration. We 
know this on the authority alike of his 
friend Deussen and also his sister. It 
is militarism which is the best counter- 
poison to democracy. The next century, 

1 Nietzsche, WerJce, XIII, 350: " ' Deutschland, Deutschland 
iiber alles' ist vielleicht die blodsinnigste Parole, die je gegeben 
worden ist. Warum iiberhaupt Deutschland, frage ich, wenn es 
nicht Etwas will, vertritt, darstellt, das mehr Werth hat, als 
irgend eine andere bisherige Macht vertritt. An sich nur ein 
grosser Staat mehr, eine Albernheit mehr in der Welt." 



198 THE WELL TO FREEDOM 

he prophesied, would be the era of the 
great wars, wars for the conquest of the 
world, and he hints not obscurely in one 
of the passages of the posthumous works 
that England must be relieved of her 
colonies, or at least that Europe must 
come to an "understanding with her," 
by which he seems to mean subjugation. 
Nietzsche's dislike of any kind of national- 
ism has blinded some people to the fact 
that his conception of the hierarchy of 
society was more like that of the Prus- 
sian monarchy than of any other part of 
Europe. 1 It was not entirely that, for 

l Werke, XIII, 352: "Englands Kleingeisterei ist die grosste 
Gefahr jetzt auf der Erde." 

He appears to have wished Russia to have the hegemony of 
Europe. The whole passage discussed is so important that I cite 
it in full. 

Werke, XIH, 358, § 881: "Urn aber mit guten Aussichten in den 
Kampf um die Regierung der Erde einzutreten — es liegt auf dem 
Stand, gegen wen sich dieser Kampf richten wird — hat Europa 
wahrscheinlich nothig, sich ernsthaft mit England zu ver- 
standigen; es bedarf der Colonien Englands zu jenem Kampf e 
ebenso, wie das jetzige Deutschland, zur Einubung in seine neue 
Vermittler- und Makler-Rolle, der Colonien Hollands bedarf. 
Niemand namlich glaubt mehr daran, dass England selber stark 
genug sei, seine alte Rolle nur noch fiinfzig Jahre fortzuspielen; 
es geht an der Unmoghchkeit, die homines novi von der Regie- 
rung auszuschliessen, zu Grunde, und man muss keinen solchen. 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 199 

he did not put the soldiers first. Nietzsche, 
like Bismarck, is one of the leaders of the 
reaction against the ideals of the French 
Revolution. That reaction has had many 
aspects. In some ways Nietzsche's is the 
most radical, for it is based on a notion 
independent of wealth or political rank 
and regards the masses as mere means to 
the man of true power. Nietzsche's new 
order of rulers are not to claim, as in an- 
cient aristocracies, that they are privileged 
in virtue of their services to the com- 
munity. Rather the community exists 
to make them possible. Their raison d'etre, 
however, is far beyond themselves and 
involves immediate sacrifice. They exist 
to raise the type man, and with it to in- 
augurate a higher culture. 

This latter function it is which indicates 

Wechsel der Parteien haben, urn solche langwierige Dinge vorzu- 
bereiten; man muss heute vorerst Soldat sein um als Kaufmann 
nicht seinen Kredit zu verlieren. Genug: hierin, wie in anderen 
Dingen, wird das nachste Jahrhundert in den Fusstapfen Napo- 
leons zu finden sein, des ersten und vorwegnehmendsten Men- 
schen neuerer Zeit. Fur die Aufgaben der nachsten Jahrhunderte 
sind die Arten Offentlichkeit und Parliamentarismus die un- 
zweckmassigsten Organisationen." 



200 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

the essential difference between Nietzsche 
and a writer by whom it has been alleged 
he was deeply influenced, Max Stirner. 
Max Stirner is the nom de guerre of a cer- 
tain Karl Schmidt who lived in the first 
half of the nineteenth century, dying in 
1856. He wrote a book on the History of 
the Reaction, i. e., the reaction against the 
French Revolution. It is, however, his 
single work Der Einzige und sein Eigen- 
thum, by which he is best known. This 
book was not very well known at the 
time, 1848. Perhaps it would never have 
been dug out, had it not been for the 
vogue of Nietzsche. Now it has been 
published in an American translation with 
a laudatory preface by Doctor Walker, 
who proclaims its difference from, and, 
in his view, superiority to, Nietzsche. I 
believe that Doctor Walker is right in the 
fact, although wrong in his estimate. It 
must be said that the debt of Nietzsche 
to Max Stirner is believed by many to be 
great. Much is made of it by M. Fouillee 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 201 

in his interesting book on Nietzsche et 
rimmoralisme. One writer, Doctor Paul 
Carus, in Nietzsche and other Exponents of 
Individualism, goes farther. Not only in 
his words on Nietzsche's predecessor (pp. 
74-92) does he assert the very strong 
direct connection of the two, but he goes 
on to say that Nietzsche's omission to 
mention the fact that he had pillaged Max 
Stirner for his characteristic ideas is not 
to be wondered at. It is no more than 
Nietzsche's application in his own person 
of the doctrine that the superman is be- 
yond good and evil, relieved of the ordinary 
obligations of decent behaviour. Nothing 
seems to me less fair than this judgment. 
Nietzsche's non-mention of Stirner is cer- 
tainly not decisive against his having read 
him. Even if he had not read him, he 
might have learned his drift from some- 
body else. He must have known about 
him, for Hartmann discusses him. That 
he should have deliberately refrained from 
mentioning Stirner in order to win a 



202 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

spurious reputation for originality is not 
in keeping with Nietzsche's character. Be- 
sides, if that were so, traces of Max Stirner 
would be found in the posthumous works. 

The reason why I think that Nietzsche 
could not have been influenced by Max 
Stirner, except in certain non-essential mat- 
ters, such as dislike of the democratic 
ideals of the French Revolution, is that the 
two systems are in reality antagonistic, 
and only in appearance at all similar. 
Stirner's doctrine is briefly this: The one 
reality is the ego, and he should aim at 
taeating the world as mere material for 
his amusement. Max Stirner tries to 
shew that Christianity did a service to 
mankind in so far as it set them free from 
the gods of this world and proclaimed its 
nothingness in comparison with real satis- 
faction. Unfortunately, it did this only 
in order to introduce a deeper slavery to 
abstractions concerning the other world. 
All supernaturalism he condemns just as 
Nietzsche does. But he goes on to say 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 203 

that every kind of moral ideal is only a 
form of supernaturalism, a ghost or bogie- 
man with which we are terrified. The real 
nature of religion is contained in this 
fact — it enslaves man to a principle. It 
does not matter what the principle is. So 
long as we allow ourselves to be directed 
by it, we are not independent. The one 
thing we know is ourselves — and we are 
fools if we allow ourselves to be enslaved 
to any form of authority, church or state 
or class or tradition or morals. All these 
things are dodges invented by other people, 
in order that with their help they may 
tyrannise over us. Not merely this. A 
man is equally a slave when he is the 
follower of an ideal, even though that 
ideal be self-chosen. Justice is absurd, 
for that is a social principle; and our sole 
business is to use the universe for our- 
selves. Truth, as an end, is no less silly, 
for it prevents us doing what we want at 
the moment. All ideals which look to 
the future are of the nature of religion 



204 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

and are merely vain imaginations, bogies. 
The ghostly world of our dreams is the 
factory out of which men have invented 
the supernatural. Afterwards this became 
the ideal world of moral purposes. Then, 
with the positivist .conception annihilat- 
ing the supernatural and all idealist ethics, 
there has come the idea of Humanity. All 
these in turn are worshipped, and the last, 
Humanity, the principle of the French Rev- 
olution, is not the less dangerous, because 
it comes in the form of enlightenment. At 
bottom those who hold it are bogie-worship- 
pers, no better than Christians. Even Free- 
dom as an ideal is ridiculous, because it sets 
forth a principle, which will interfere with 
the ego. 

The doctrine may be called radical 
egoism. It is an unrelieved individualism 
which would set the ego to work his will 
in the world, treating everything else as 
mere force, and might do good in pro- 
tecting a man from the conventions of 
his own past. Nothing but a calculation 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 205 

of probability could prevent his yielding 
to his immediate impulses at any moment. 
Nero appears to be admired by the author, 
although one passage gives a hint that he 
does not set forward a pure hedonism. If 
this be so, we can only save his heart at 
the expense of his head. On his own 
theory, absolutely nothing ought to hinder 
the ego at any moment, and self-realisa- 
tion is interfered with when every imme- 
diate pleasure is foregone in the name of a 
future good. 

Max Stirner's protest against the sen- 
timental idealism of his day — the day of 
Mazzini — is stringent enough in all con- 
science, and for the most part unattrac- 
tive. As a criticism it is acute. Like 
Nietzsche, Max Stirner detests democracy, 
and even more obviously than Nietzsche 
does he express the movement of reaction 
against the French Revolution and the 
watchwords Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. 
Like Nietzsche, Max Stirner disliked utilita- 
rians, and, like Nietzsche, he scorned all 



206 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

those new codes of ethics which are in 
the eyes of their propounders to contain 
all the essence of Christianity, divorced 
from its dogmas. Like Nietzsche, he sees 
the futility of expecting to retain the Chris- 
tian values in human life, if the Christian 
faith has gone by the board. Like Nietzsche 
also, he saw that, apart from a Christian, 
or at least an idealist, doctrine of the in- 
dividual soul, there are no real grounds 
for preaching a doctrine of fellowship or 
humanity or the golden rule, or whatever 
you call it. Here are a few passages: 

"As long as you believe in the truth, 
you do not believe in yourself, and you 
are a servant, a religious man. You 
alone are the truth, or rather, you are 
more than the truth, which is nothing 
at all before you." x 

"One has a prospect of extirpating 
religion down to the ground only when 
one antiquates society and everything 
that flows from this principle." 2 

1 Stirner, 472. 2 Ibid., 413. 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 207 

"The religious consists in discontent 
with the present man, i. e., in the setting 
up of a perfection to be striven for, in 
man 'wrestling for his completion' (Ye 
therefore should be perfect as your father 
in heaven is perfect). It consists in the 
fixation of an ideal, an absolute. Per- 
fection is the ' supreme good,' the finis 
bonorum ; everyone's ideal is the perfect 
man, the true, the free man, etc. 

"The efforts of modern times aim to 
set the ideal of the 'free man.' If one 
could find it, there would be a new relig- 
ion, because a new ideal; there would 
be a new longing, a new torment, a new 
devotion, a new deity, a new contri- 
tion." 1 

The question is, is this doctrine of 
unbridled egoism the same as that of 
Nietzsche? I cannot think it. It may 
plausibly be argued that if it is not what 
Nietzsche meant, it is what he ought to 

1 Ibid., The Ego and His Ovm, 321. 



208 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

have meant. Or it may be said that ulti- 
mately this is what Nietzsche's principle 
would work out to, if accepted by the mass 
of men. It may be so. My point is that 
it is not what Nietzsche meant, nor any- 
thing like what he meant: that it is in 
direct opposition to some of Nietzsche's 
most important principles, such as natural 
asceticism, the sacrifice of ages in order 
to speed the superman, the raising of the 
type of man. Stirner protests against the 
whole idea of the type of man. Nietzsche, 
it is true, dislikes Humanity, and will 
have nothing to do with equality; that is 
because he wants to prepare the way for 
something better, the reign of the super- 
man—who would to Max Stirner have 
been only a new bogie, worse than the old. 
Here and there Nietzsche has a remark 
which might have been suggested by Max 
Stirner; even that is by no means certain, 
although we are not concerned to deny it. 
The essay of Max Stirner on The Untrue 
Principle in Our Education in the volume 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 209 

selections by Mackay might have influenced 
Nietzsche a little. In the main, Nietzsche's 
manner of presentment is so different, and 
his doctrine so much more complex, that it 
is hard to believe in any connection — unless 
there be some direct evidence. That there 
is not. Nietzsche's superman is an ideal. 
It is the quality of a new aristocracy; no 
one living now incarnates this higher man. 
Good Europeans are to undergo severe 
discipline in order that their descendants 
may be supermen. The superman is sub- 
ject to certain principles, which Stirner 
would dub ghosts — courage and a high 
heart, heroic endeavour, great sufferings, 
great health, the refusal ever to say no to 
experience. Nietzsche desired a body of 
self-controlled rulers with distinguished 
manners — every one of these qualities em- 
bodies a principle, and requires discipline 
and some kind of faith. Max Stirner's 
system may have some affinity with that 
of Nietzsche. It embodies every one of 
his worst faults with vulgarity added, and 



210 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

would produce a world of pretentious 
egoists. The superman, as the creator of 
a high culture, is a very different ideal 
from the ego with all the world for his 
box of toys. Whatever Nietzsche may 
have thought of Max Stirner, there can 
hardly be much doubt as to what Max 
Stirner would have thought of Nietzsche. 
"Bah!" he would have said, "free air, 
pure air. Get out of my sight with your 
Gespenster, your will to power, your life 
with a capital L, and your superman — 
superghost you should have said. You 
call yourself Zarathustra the ungodly, the 
Antichrist, the creator of new values, the 
destroyer, the immoralist. Go away ! You 
are no better than the cobweb spinner of 
Konigsberg and his great-aunt the Cate- 
gorical Imperative. Your eternal recur- 
rence, and all your talk of eternity, the 
aim of all delight, your belief in the genii 
of the ring, your finding eternity in the mo- 
ment recalls to me that hoary old humbug 
of Jena, who found the Absolute Idea 



NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 211 

objectified in the Prussian state. As to 
your superman, he is a ghost — like all 
other ghosts, and your disciples will be 
slaves like the rest of their crowd. Ideal- 
ists, Comtists, Liberty-loving atheists — all 
of you are no better than the Christians 
you despise. 

"Yes, I tell you you are a Christian, like 
all the others, no better except that you 
have added self-deception to their vices. 
You think you are new, yet you are as much 
a preacher of duty as Lycurgus. Your 
Dionysos cult is religion back one more, 
whether you call it Dionysos or Christ, 
it is all the same, if you are to fall down in 
reverence. Capital letters are all idola- 
try. You even make an idol out of Life. 
What is Life, pray, that I am to fall down 
and worship it? I reject the monstrous 
slavery of your amor fati. Besides, I know 
nothing about it. I know only that I am 
here. 

"Poor fellow! You have tried hard to 
be shocking, and have succeeded only in 



212 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

being silly. You actually talk of redemp- 
tion, of the salvation of man. Go back 
to your Frau Pastorin and to Church." 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 

What is the secret of Nietzsche's vogue ? 
Even if we were to adopt the view of Signor 
Papini, that the secret of Nietzsche, veiled 
from us by a lofty eloquence, is weakness, 
we should still be far from explaining the 
spell which he exerts. That spell is a 
fact. Nietzsche has some conquering 
charm in him. By this he attracts not 
only Nietzscheans pure and simple, whose 
reading of his doctrine might not always 
be acceptable to their master, but many 
others. Superior persons, or those liking 
the pose of aristocracy without its obliga- 
tions, young men and even more young 
women glad to be free of tradition find in 
him a new-born hope; 1 some philosophers 
who disagree with him profoundly, and 

1 Nietzsche made himself the exponent of a tendency, and as 
such he has his followers among large masses of people whom he 
despised as belonging to the herd. 

213 



214 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

Christians who are opposed to his central 
doctrine may be found to admire and al- 
most to love the hermit of Sils-Maria, the 
prophet of Zarathustra, the singer of the 
Eternal Recurrence. Musicians and educa- 
tionists prize him for much that he says 
about positive as against negative virtue, 
and for the wide horizons of culture he 
sets before his "higher men." "Every 
idiot fancies himself an Ubermensch" was 
a remark made once to me by an erudite 
Bavarian. The pocket edition of Also 
sprach Zarathustra marks a circulation of 
close on 140,000. In the British Museum 
there are to be found about one hundred 
books and pamphlets on him in German 
alone; many in other languages. M. 
Bernoulli devotes two immense volumes 
to the friendship between Nietzsche and 
the Swiss historical theologian Overbeck. 
Even his personal affairs are the subject 
of almost a wide literature. What is the 
meaning of this? 

Not entirely, not mainly, his message. 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 215 

Some people there have been who are for 
treating Nietzsche as negligible and dis- 
missing his criticisms as the ravings of a 
lunatic. That is not a wise proceeding, as 
M. Seillieres points out at the close of a 
work devoted to severe criticism, Apollon ou 
Dionysos. Mere insanity would not have 
given him such a vogue. Nowadays, at 
least, his wide-spread prevalence makes 
it impossible to leave him aside. Let us 
take his influence as a fact, and in this 
lecture try to gain some notion of his 
charm. In the next we can consider his 
importance. How much of enduring fame 
he will win no one can prophesy. 

First of all comes the fact of the ex- 
traordinary personal character of all his 
writings. We see in Nietzsche, no less 
than we do in Newman, the literary ex- 
pression of a soul on fire. Nietzsche will 
not write until he has fused his brooding 
thought into a unity of feeling. When he 
does write, that unity of feeling is so deeply 
concentrated that his very force tends to 



216 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

take captive the reader, almost irrespective 
of what he says. Schellwien 1 in his little 
book^on Stirner and Nietzsche pronounces 
that he is so entirely a dogmatist in his 
writing that one must always take him or 
leave him, according as his ideas appeal 
intuitively. Nietzsche felt this himself. 
In a letter to Georg Brandes he said 
that he had come to distrust dialectic and 
even all grounds at all, i. e., he must go 
by pure intuition. 2 This does not mean 
that he took up notions at random; 3 rather 
that he went through the long psychical 
process of weighing and reconsidering, and 
then, when the whole seemed clear, he 



1 "Da sonach Nietzsche's Denken durch und durch dogmatisch 
ist, so ist es kein Gegenstand fiir Diskussion. Wer ebenso glaubt 
mag es annehmen; wer es nicht glaubt, braucht sich nicht weiter 
dariiber zu beunruliigen." (Robert Schellwien, Max Stirner und 
F. Nietzsche, 27.) 

2 "In der Skala meiner Erlebnisse und Zustande, ist das tTber- 
gewicht auf Seiten der seltneren, ferneren, dtinneren Tonlagen 
gegen die normaleren, mittleren. . . . Endlich — und das wohl 
am meisten macht meine Biicher dunkel — es gibt in mir ein 
Misstrauen gegen Dialektik, selbst gegen Griinde." Nietzsche 
to Brandes. {Briefe, III, 274.) 

3 Doctor Wolf points this out; although he rather underrates 
the inconsistencies in Nietzsche — not the difference between the 
three periods, but inconsistency at any moment. 



^ Oc 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 217 

kicked away the ladder, ending by think- 
ing it a bore, a waste of time, to discuss 
the grounds. If a person could not see 
what he saw, Nietzsche would not convert 
him by argument. 

It is this power to write with blood of 
which he boasts. Nietzsche, in his own 
view, lived more deeply than other people, 
and therefore, having mastered the art 
of expression, he was able to write with 
such compelling force. The certainty, the 
prophetic conviction with which he writes 
have in them something as of a vision, a 
thing seen. 1 More and more this note of 
dogmatism has become effective in our 
day. It is notable alike in philosophy, in 
literature, in politics. The note of ab- 
soluteness may do no more than express 



1 Nietzsche in his later period laments the fanaticism of his 
earlier writings. Yet in truth he grew more jriolent as he grew 
older. 

"Als ich jiingst den Versuch machte, meihe alteren Schriften, 
die ich vergessen hatte, kennen zu lernen, /rschrack ich iiber ein 
gemeinsames Merkmal derselben: sie spnechen die Sprache des 
Fanatismus. . . . Der Fanatismus verdirbt den Charakter, den 
Geschmack, und zuletzt auch die Ge^undheit." (Werke, XII, 
179.) 



218 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

a strong personal idiosyncrasy. In this 
age, however, unlike some others, this is 
an advantage; the tentative scientific un- 
derstatement is apt to repel. We can see 
this in our political and artistic contro- 
versies; in most of our popular essays and 
in nearly all modern criticism. It may be 
a consequence of the weakness of an age 
which wants to be secured against its own 
timidity. But it is a fact. 

Secondly — but this is largely the conse- 
quence of that personal quality — Nietzsche 
strikes the imagination. This is what is 
needed now to secure any man an empire. 
Whether in politics or philosophy or busi- 
ness, it is not intellect but imaginative 
authority that wins a spell. Even if those 
were right who identified the teaching of 
Nietzsche with that of Max Stirner, they 
would never be able to secure for the 
latter one tithe of the popularity of Nietz- 
sche. 

Max Stirner lacks these qualities of style 
and imagination. It may be said that all 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 219 

this is briefly summed in the statement that 
Nietzsche is a poet. That is true. "Art," 
we are told, "is the expression of sincere 
emotion," and judged by that canon 
Nietzsche is an artist of no mean order. 
His genius is essentially lyrical. 1 That is 
to say, it is his personal, individual feeling 
which breaks into the "lyrical cry," and 
this feeling is always or nearly always 
measured by some criticism of life. Thus, 
his poetic quality embodies the two strands. 
It is not mere singing, in some enchanted 
garden, away from the drab dulness of 
the world; it is not mere philosophy un- 
informed by experience; it is the fusion 
of the two by the alembic of a vivid per- 

1 " When we read him, we are moved not by classic, but by 
romantic art, he transfers us to the rococo world, not to that of 
the Renaissance; he incites in us dramatic tension and lyric stress, 
while he lacks epic calm and exuberance. But he is a master 
of his art, and we might call him in a certain sense the Richard 
Wagner of German prose. 

" Long after his unjust warfare against Christianity, his con- 
tradictory theories, which do violence to facts, his clumsy re- 
constructions and exaggerations have been forgotten he will 
be remembered as one of the greatest German stylists — as a 
poet of powerful diction, as a master of language and of musical 
declamation in words." (Kiilpe, The Philosophy of the Present 
in Germany, translated by M. and O. Patrick, p. 129.) 



220 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

sonality, which gives Xietzsche his charm, 
and will probably continue to give it. 
Take, for instance, the Xight-Song in 
Zarathustra. This was one of Nietzsche's 
own favourites: 

" 'Xight it is: now talk louder all 
springing wells. And my soul is a 
springing well. 

" 'Xight it is: only now all songs of 
the loving awake. And my soul is the 
song of a loving one. 

" 'Something never stilled, something 
never to be stilled is within me. It 
longeth to give forth sound. A longing 
for love is within me, that itself speaketh 
the language of love. 

" 'Light I am: would that I were 
night ! But it is my loneliness, to be 
girded round by light. 

" 'Oh, that I were dark and like the 
night ! How would I suck at the breasts 
of light ! 

And I would bless even you, ye 



a ( 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 221 

small, sparkling stars and glowworms 
on high — and be blessed by your gifts 
of light ! 

: 'But in mine own light I live, back 
into myself I drink the flames that 
break forth from me. 

'I know not the happiness of the 
receiver. And often I dreamt that steal- 
ing was needs much sweeter than receiv- 
ing. 

" 'It is my poverty that my hand 
never resteth from giving; it is mine 
envy that I see waiting eyes and the il- 
luminated nights of longing. 

"'Oh, unblessedness of all givers! 
Oh, obscuration of my sun ! Oh, long- 
ing for longing! Oh, famished voracity 
in the midst of satisfaction ! 

" 'They take things from me; but do 
I touch their soul? There is a gulf be- 
tween giving and taking, and the small- 
est gulf is the most difficult to bridge 
over. 

" 'A hunger waxeth out of my beauty: 



222 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

I would cause pain unto those whom I 
bring light; I would fain bereave those 
I gave my gifts to. Thus am I hungry 
for wickedness. 

" 'Taking back my hand when an- 
other hand stretcheth out for it; hesitat- 
ing like the waterfall that hesitateth 
when raging down — thus am I hungry 
for wickedness. 

" 'Such revenge is invented by mine 
abundance; such insidiousness springeth 
from my loneliness." 

" 'My happiness of giving died from 
giving; my virtue became weary of it- 
self from its abundance ! 

" 'He who always giveth is in danger 
to lose his sense of shame; he who al- 
ways distributeth getteth hard swel- 
lings on his hand and heart from dis- 
tributing. 

' 'Mine eye no longer floweth over 
from the shame of the begging ones; 
my hand hath become too hard to feel 
the trembling of full hands. 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 223 

'Whither went the tear of mine eye, 
and the down of my heart? Oh, soli- 
tude of all givers ! Oh, silence of all 
lighters ! 

'Many suns circle round in empty 
space: unto all that is dark they speak 
with their light — unto me they are silent. 
" 'Oh, that is the enmity of light 
against what shineth ! Without pity it 
wandereth on its course. 

'Unfair towards what shineth in 
the heart of its heart, cold towards 
suns, thus walketh every sun. 

; 'Like the storm the suns fly on their 
courses; that is their walking. They 
follow their inexorable will; that is 
their coldness. 

' 'Oh, it is only ye, ye dark ones, ye 
of the night who create warmth out of 
what shineth ! Oh, it is only ye who 
drink milk and refreshment from the 
udders of light ! 

" 'Alas, there is ice round me; my 
hand burneth itself when touching what 



224 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

is icy ! Alas, there is thirst within me 
that is thirsty for your thirst ! 

" ' Night it is: alas, that I must be 
a light ! And a thirst for what is of the 
night ! And solitude ! 

" * Night it is: now, like a well, my 
longing breaketh forth from me. I am 
longing for speech. 

" 'Night it is: now talk louder all 
springing wells. And my soul is a 
springing well. 

" 'Night it is: only now all songs of 
the loving awake. And my soul is the 
song of a loving one.' 

" Thus sang Zarathustra." 1 

Nietzsche's sense of his own inspiration 
finds vent in a highly charged passage of 
Ecce Homo, 2 quoted in the last lecture. 
The megalomania of that piece is repul- 
sive. Yet, some of the analysis is acute. 
Zarathustra — and that is Nietzsche at his 
highest — has that quality of inevitableness 

1 Thus Spake Zarathustra, II, The Night-Song, pp. 149-151. 

2 Ecce Homo, pp. 101, 106. 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 225 

in the writing which belongs to the highest 
art. The sense of far distances, of a trans- 
lucent atmosphere as though the Alps 
had made themselves into music, is with 
us very frequently; also a certain irides- 
cence of changing colours. One of the 
minor merits of Nietzsche is the multi- 
plicity of fresh landscapes and kaleido- 
scopic variety of his pictures. As M. 
Fouillee remarks: 

"Sa poesie est un lyrisme puissant: sa 
philosophic a je ne sais quoi de pittoresque 
qui reduit Fimagination; c'est une serie 
de tableaux, de paysages, de visions et de 
reves, un voyage romantique en un pays 
enchante, ou les scenes terribles succedent 
aux scenes joyeuses, ou le burlesque s'in- 
tercale au milieu du sublime. Nietzsche 
est sympathique par les grands cotes. La 
seule chose antipathique en cette belle 
ame c'est la superbe de la pensee. Toute 
doctrine d'aristocratie exclusive est d'ail- 
leurs une doctrine d'orgueil, et tout or- 



THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

gueil n'est-il pas un commencement de 
folie? Chez Nietzsche le sentiment aris- 
tocratique a quelque chose de maladif." l 



Probably not a little of his attraction 
for many is owing to this. This is the day 
of flash-light and electric movement. 
Nietzsche is like a motor, whirling the 
occupant through many countries, giving 
at once the sense of rapid movement and 
of changeful beauty. His very inconsis- 
tencies and the aphoristic habit are a 
help in this respect. 2 Many of his books — 
though not the best — can be opened and 
read for a minute or two and convey in 
this way both light and artistic pleasure. 

1 Fouillee, Avant-Propos, VI. The following passage is a good 
instance of this. 

"Wir sind die ersten Aristokraten in der Geschiehte der Geister 
— der historische Sinn beginnt erst jetzt." (Nietzsche, XI, 217.) 

2 "Les aphorismes conviennent a un public qui n'a ni le temps 
ni les moyens de rien approfondir et qui s'en fie volontiers aux 
feuilles sibyUines, surtout si elles sont poetiques au point de lui 
paraitre inspirees. L' absence meme de raisonnement et de preuve 
reguliere prete au dogmatisme negateur un air d'autorite qui 
impose a la foule des demi-instruits, litterateurs, poetes, musi- 
ciens, amateurs de tous genres. Des paradoxes en apparence 
originaux donnent a qui les accepte l'illusion flatteuse de l'ori- 
ginalite." (Fouillee, Avant-Propos, IV.) 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 227 

This must be the case with a genius so 
essentially pyrotechnic, with rockets and 
Roman candles, and then the more elabo- 
rate set pieces, to attract the deep "Oh" 
of the crowd. For, although he despised 
the crowd, it is to the crowd and to some 
of the characteristics of an age of vulgar 
machinery that Nietzsche owes part of 
his popularity. 

Not that he does not deserve it as a writer. 
He worked at style. Early in his life he 
declared that he was mastered by the 
Categorical Imperative: Thou must write. 1 
Nor must we call him a spontaneous artist. 
That note of the inevitable, of inspiration, 
is the end, not the beginning — it is the 
flash of insight that comes at the end of 
long, almost hopeless toil, the brilliant vi- 
sion that is the reward of torments both 
of body and spirit. Plainly he declares 
that none but fools can suppose that writ- 

x "Der Kategorische Imperativ, 'Du sollst und musst schrei- 
ben,' hat mich aufgeweckt. . . . 

" Es sei schwer gut zu schreiben, von Natur habe kein Mensch 
ein guten Stil, man miisse arbeiten und hartes Holz bohren, ihn 
zu erwerben." (Briefe, I, 52.) 



228 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

ing is easy. He is right; what a pity they 
do not abstain from publishing ! Countless 
gibes he casts at the Germans for their 
heavy feet in literature. Their clumsy and 
awkward notion of style is a source to 
him of frequent merriment. No one who 
had so high a regard for French culture 
would be likely to underrate the value of 
polish. Nietzsche, moreover, is well aware 
that great style is an imaginative quality, 
not mere statement. Mr. Bernard Shaw 
has done much to popularise Nietzsche 
by "Man and Superman." Yet the two 
writers are poles apart. Mr. Shaw may 
seem a poet to the German Chancellor. 
That is akin to his other "errors." Some- 
where or other Mr. Shaw declared that 
"effectiveness of statement is the one qual- 
ity of good writing." Were this true, 
we ought all to go to school to that new 
genre in literature — advertisement. Nietz- 
sche saw just the opposite. Writing is akin 
to music. It is an appeal to the subsconcious 
more than to the logical faculty. Other- 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 229 

wise mathematical treatises would be the 
noblest literature, and the writer of an 
index or a synopsis superior in many cases 
to his original. Language is used some- 
times, and Mr. Shaw lends colour to this 
view, if he does not reach it, which would 
imply that there would be little lost if, 
instead of the thirteenth chapter of First 
Corinthians, we had some such abstract 
as the following: 

Love, described by St. Paul, characteristics of, 
more excellent than other gifts; 
superior to (a) eloquence, 
(6) martyrdom, 

(c) faith, 

(d) giving charity, 

their worthlessness without love, as illus- 
trated by (a) brass (b) cymbals; 

its enduring quality; 

self -emptying; 

faith, hope, in what way inferior; 

illustrated by author's own growth from 
child to adult. 

This dilemma, or something like it, is 
what lies before the numerous people who 
regard themselves as superior to the style 



230 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

prejudice and condemn a work in propor- 
tion as it is well written. Nietzsche, who 
made so much of the rhythmic element, 
the dance, knew very well that language is 
a sacrament of the soul, and that style is 
good or bad in proportion as it is able to 
communicate this. He declares it in his 
love of musical terms to be the communica- 
tion by means of the rhythm and colour of 
words of a certain tempo — i. e., the creation 
of a condition in the reader — emotional, 
imaginative, and intellectual. In another 
place he says: "My style is a dance." 

In the degree in which this is done we 
have really great writing. Most writing 
fails in this, because it is too conventional, 
not always because the writers do not feel 
greatly. In early days all writing tends 
to become a cento of conventional phrases, 
e. g., children's letters. Only later on does 
self-expression in any degree become pos- 
sible. That other ideal of Mr. Shaw means 
self-expression of a kind, but only of one 
kind — it assumes that all of us are per- 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 231 

petually in debate, and that some form or 
other of platform speaking is the end. 
Even here, when platform speaking reaches 
a high point, it passes with an orator into 
something like poetic communication. 
Nietzsche's interest as a writer comes 
partly from this power of placing discus- 
sions, apparently academic, in a setting 
of beauty and imagination. This is mani- 
fest in one of Nietzsche's earliest works, 
a course of lectures delivered at Basle on 
The Future of Our Educational Institutions. 
The picture of the meeting of the two 
students with the old professor and his 
friend, and the overhearing of their con- 
versation provides at once a scene into 
which the reader can enter with sym- 
pathy. Akin to this is another quality, 
which comes of Nietzsche's passionate one- 
sidedness. Not only has he come to see 
everything in a unity, but he forces the 
reader to do so, and persuades him before 
he is aware. Some dialecticians will quietly 
assume premises which cut off nearly all 



232 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

the objections of their interlocutor. Not 
by dialectic, but through the force of their 
personality they prevent him remembering 
these objections by driving all his energies 
to defend what is really some side-issue. 
Thus they win an easy victory. In the 
field, thus artificially limited, they are right. 
Some of Nietzsche's charm is due to this 
method. In the Genealogy of Morals or 
Antichrist he commonly discerns some 
motive really operative among certain 
people, e. g., resentment at weakness. Then 
by his own chosen one-sidedness he isolates 
this factor and by the force of his personal- 
ity prevents the casual reader from seeing 
any other. To a mind at all trained, his 
early history of the Jewish people and of 
early Christianity is a travesty of the 
facts, no less than the attempt to make 
our Lord the preacher of a Tolstoyan 
Gospel of Quietism. Nietzsche owed to 
Tolstoy and to Schopenhauer more than 
he supposed. His account of the personal- 
ity of Christ is merely a work of imagina- 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 233 

tion; it ignores all the sterner side and 
takes him as a preacher of non-resistance 
pure and simple. 

To take another instance. The Will to 
Power truly expresses an important ele- 
ment in all life; nor is it by a process of 
far-fetched interpretation altogether im- 
possible to reduce everything to scale. 
The attempt, on the whole, is no whit 
different from that of the hedonist, whom 
Nietzsche despised, to explain all human 
action by the motive of pleasure-seeking. 
The process of interpretation in each case 
has to be so elaborate as to deprive it of 
all value. In The Will to Power the skill 
of Nietzsche is shown not so much in the 
expression of his principle, as in the pas- 
sion of personal faith which possessed 
him, and in his very contempt of demons- 
trative reasoning. The reader who sees 
a little and says, "That is true; I had not 
seen it before," is carried forward on a 
sea of criticism, epigram, eloquence, and 
passionate prophecy. Long before his crit- 



234 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

ical faculty is awakened he may be swept 
into the current. 

All this springs from the fact we spoke 
of earlier. Nietzsche is a dogmatist and 
a preacher. In one place he said that any 
one born with an ancestry of preachers 
will tend to be dogmatic, to a "thus said 
the Lord" method of discourse. In an- 
other he alludes to his being descended 
from a line of Lutheran pastors. Cer- 
tainly his writings afford evidence of his 
own theory. The closing passage of his 
early piece on Wagner reads like the 
peroration of a sermon. 

While he is dogmatic and abusive, he 
does not claim to be final. Superpapal 
almost in his notion of infallibility, he re- 
gards even the uttering of truth as an 
adventure, and disclaims all idea of sys- 
tem. The desire for proof, the anxiety of 
scientific or statistical men for mathemat- 
ical certainty he declares to be a sign of 
counting-house blood. Science is the crea- 
tion of fear, while art comes from courage. 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 235 

People whose fathers and grandfathers 
were clerks must always be coming to 
conclusions. This is the foundation, this 
and timidity, of the passion for certitude 
and for the mechanical card-catalogue 
method of knowledge. In truth nothing 
is certain; all our theories are thoughts 
thrown out at a great subject; we must 
go on always creators, ever ready for fresh 
adventures, "never resting in a facile 
orthodoxy of Comte or Hegel or of our 
own." You remember the famous epilogue 
in which Walter Pater, writing from the 
opposite standpoint, that of pure hedonism, 
declared that "one must ever go on court- 
ing new impressions, testing new opinions." 
So Nietzsche disclaimed all idea of dis- 
ciples, merely repeating his catchwords; 
what he wants is a new spirit, fresh and 
creative minds. 

That, perhaps, is his greatest charm. 
He set men free. The last age was over- 
come by the tyranny of determinism. 
What is known as scientific fatalism had 



236 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

hold of it. A method which in natural 
science was fruitful was thought sufficient 
for a philosophy of life. Freedom was 
denied, and all history and even individual 
life was made to consist of links in a chain 
of inevitable development. Evolution was 
treated as a process entirely mechanical. 
Nietsche's own words are worth citing: 

1 "The belief in willing. To believe 
that a thought may be the cause of a 
mechanical movement is to believe in 
miracles. The consistency of science de- 
mands that, once we have made the 
world thinkable for ourselves by means 
of pictures, we should also make the 
emotions, the desires, the will, etc., 
thinkable — that is to say, we should 
deny them, and treat them as errors of 
the intellect" 1 

It was hoped to explain all events 
mathematically and to deduce the whole 
history of the world, including man, from 

1 The Will to Power, II, 143. 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 237 

the inevitable clash of physical forces. 
This, I suppose, was the faith of Herbert 
Spencer, and was expounded in the famous 
words of Tyndall about the genius of a 
Shakespeare being potential in the fires of 
the sun. It found classical expression in 
the words of Du Bois-Reymond, about 
getting an abstract account of the course 
of things in a few differential equations. 

Nowadays, M. Bergson and many others, 
including some men of science, have pro- 
pounded a theory of evolution radically 
different. We are told that it is essentially 
creative; that freedom is the aim. Freedom 
in some degree pervades the world. Its 
growth is neither inevitable nor mechan- 
ical. As to the future, we can be nowhere 
assured of aught but a high probability. 

Nietzsche is one of the influences which 
have helped in this direction, and minis- 
tered to the self-criticism of science. 1 Prac- 

1 Werke, XIII, 85, § 213: "Die Entwicklung der mechanistisch- 
atomistischen Denkweise ist sich heute ihres nothwendigen Ziels 
immer noch nicht bewusst — das ist mein Eindruck nachdem ich 
lange genug ihren Anhangern zwischen die Finger gesehen habe. 



238 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

tically, though not theoretically, his philos- 
ophy is a doctrine of freedom. Doctor 
Wolf holds that Nietzsche allows a small 
degree of freedom to all. But this is doubt- 
ful. If everything be driven by a blind 
will to power, how can there be any real 
freedom? It is the same with materialism. 
Nietzsche not only denies any metaphys- 
ical entity, but he speaks of the soul as 
the companion and echo of the body. 
This seems like pure materialism. Yet 
Nietzsche denies alike materialism and 
determinism. He does profess an uncom- 
promising naturalism, and it is difficult to 
see how he can escape from either of these 
two. 

Yet it is freedom he cares for. His 
assertion of the reality of life leads right 
away from determinism, and his perpetual 
imperative is: Act as though thou art 
free. Since Nietzsche in his Genealogy of 
Morals throws scorn on the notion of 

Sie wird mit der Schaffung eines Systems von Zeichen endigen: 
sie wird auf Erklaren verzichten, sie wird den Begriff, 'Ursache 
und Wirkung, ' auf geben." 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 239 

moral responsibility, it is hard to see how 
any freedom which he teaches amounts 
to much. It is always conceived as mere 
animal energy, the butting against his 
fellows by the splendid blond beast. Yet 
it remains the fact that, whether con- 
sistently or the reverse, Nietzsche has had 
to many the charm of an apostle of free- 
dom as against a mechanical conception 
of development. At bottom, as M. Berg- 
son has pointed out, a world in which there 
is no freedom, but everything proceeds 
necessarily out of the chain of events, is 
a dead world — a clock running down. 
Now, the Eternal Recurrence may seem to 
favour such a view even on the part of 
Nietzsche. But at least its effect is op- 
posite^ — it is a sense of creative activity 
in art, in life, and in thought. Whatever 
be the defects of a doctrine of mere power, 
there is no question that to convinced 
adherents of the naturalistic view of the 
world, Nietzsche comes as preaching a 
gospel of hope and deliverance, whereas 



240 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

in its more common form that doctrine 
leads to a chilling fatalism. Just as 
Nietzsche forward a positive instead of 
a negative sense of moral duty, so he 
ministers to a positive as against a negative 
and depressed atheism. His charm, then, 
is this: without any taint of orthodoxy, 
free, as he claims, not only of all Christian 
but of all idealist or moralist tradition, 
realist to the core, he delivers his disciple 
from the tyranny not only of the Heaven 
above, but also of the earth beneath. He 
is to live as though nothing were in- 
evitable, as master, not slave, of the uni- 
verse, finding in it, even if he is worsted, a 
noble foe, ready for the new, the unknown, 
the exceptional, climbing daily fresh Alpine 
heights of danger — enslaved neither to 
priest nor to philosopher, nor even to scien- 
tific dogmatist. Jacob earned his royal 
title by wrestling with a supernatural 
being; Nietzsche, who denies the super- 
natural, would win for his pupils a like 
principality by teaching them to wrestle 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 241 

with natural reality. Rightly or wrongly, 
many have won this way a sense of freedom, 
of the worth of life, and of trying. 

All this is bound up with his attack on 
logic. Nietzsche was by no means the 
first of the modern protesters against 
hyperintellectualism. The vogue of Wil- 
liam James, of Henri Bergson, and of 
many others is proof that he is far from 
the last. The common sense of the man 
in the street has never indeed believed in 
the claim of mere logic to decide all things. 
He has always protested in the name of 
reality against rationalism, has believed 
with Lotze that reality is richer than 
thought, and with Pascal that the heart 
has its reasons which the intellect cannot 
penetrate. Or, to put it in ordinary lan- 
guage, the instinct of the normal man 
or woman tells him how much greater a 
force is to be found in the subconscious 
and inarticulate elements of life than in 
those which can be docketed and defined. 
Nietzsche's contribution to this was real. 



242 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

He attempted to discover the origin of 
logic, and to get behind the mystery of 
language. Probably the most useful piece 
in all his psychological work is this effort 
to shew how language originates in the 
attempt to control the flux of becoming. 
(This is found largely in the later works, 
especially The Will to Power, and also in 
the thirteenth and fourteenth volumes, 
which give collected fragments.) After this 
men begin to hypostatise divisions in- 
vented with an object entirely practical. 
Then they go on to assume that to be 
fixed which is eternally changing, and un- 
consciously to invent a whole world of 
substance-Being. Nietzsche marks that 
revolution which man's attitude to think- 
ing would assume the moment people 
began seriously to apply the notion of 
evolution to the inner world of thought 
and its outcome in language. 

Nor indeed will in future even orthodox 
theology decline to admit some of the 
results of this change. The crystalline 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 243 

idea of God as an impassible Absolute 
is largely responsible for the popular be- 
lief in a dead God. Christianity, by its 
doctrine of the Trinity, is a denial of this, 
and pictures God much more in the way 
suggested by the phrase of Aristotle: as 
ivepyeca cuavrjo-Cas. 1 The changeless life of 
God is Love; but in the Christian view 
this is compatible with racing activity 
and postulates variety. Christianity at 
least has nothing to fear from the super- 
session of the static conception of God to 
one which is dynamic. 2 

This tendency may be just now exag- 
gerated, and too much stress laid on the 
element of becoming. Yet it cannot be 
denied that in this matter Nietzsche, so 
far from being unzeitgemasse, was eminently 
in accord with the evolutionary tendencies 
of this age. Some of what he says about 
the trend of science seems to herald much 
of what we hear of in connection with the 

1 Cf. C. P. S. Schiller's essay on this topic in Humanism and 
Other Essays. 

2 Cf. Baron von Hugel's criticism of Bergson. 



244 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

electronic theory of matter, with the split- 
ting up of the molecules into the infinitely 
smaller ions, with the theory that all 
matter is ultimately electricity. Also his 
general standpoint seems to favour the 
claim nowadays put forward, that science 
does not explain, but merely describes. 
The following passage affords an illustra- 
tion of this: 

"Of all the interpretations of the 
world attempted heretofore the mechan- 
ical one seems to-day to stand most 
prominently in the front. Apparently it 
has a clean conscience on its side, for no 
science believes inwardly in progress and 
success unless it be with the help of me- 
chanical procedures. Every one knows 
these procedures: ' reason' and 'purpose' 
are allowed to remain out of considera- 
tion as far as possible; it is shown that, 
provided a sufficient amount of time be 
allowed to elapse, everything can evolve 
out of everything else, and no one at- 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 245 

tempts to suppress his malicious satis- 
faction when the 'apparent design in the 
fate' of a plan or of the yolk of an egg 
may be traced to stress and thrust — in 
short, people are heartily glad to pay 
respect to this principle of profoundest 
stupidity, if I may be allowed to pass a 
playful remark concerning these serious 
matters. Meanwhile, among the most 
select intellects to be found in this 
movement, some presentiment of evil, 
some anxiety is noticeable, as if the 
theory had a rent in it, which sooner or 
later might be its last: I mean the sort 
of rent which denotes the end of all bal- 
loons inflated with such theories. 

"Stress and thrust themselves can- 
not be 'explained'; one cannot get rid 
of the actio in distans. The belief even 
in the ability to explain is now lost, 
and people peevishly admit that one 
can only describe, not explain, that the 
dynamic interpretation of the world, 
with its denial of ( empty space,' and its 



246 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

little agglomerations of atoms, will soon 
get the better of physicists: although 
in this way Dynamic is certainly granted 
an inner quality." * 

Other factors in Nietzsche's success are 
to be considered. With the decay of 
rhetoric and the period, men have come 
to like the electric style. Nietzsche knew 
this, and is for ever switching on bright 
lights. There is no repose in it, no majesty, 
little balance. A French critic 2 is hardly 
unjust when he declares: 

"En somme, un style mele, baroque, 
inegal, riche et meme somptueux en 
images, passionne hors de mesure dans 
l'expression, tou jours courant apres l'ex- 
cessif, l'inedit, l'ineprouve, toujours par 
dela, un style merveilleusement 'ondoyant 
et divers' comme Thomme meme dont il 
nous restitut la singuliere et vivante 
image." 

1 The Will to Power, II, 109. 2 Pallares, 151. 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 247 

This style recalls the Greeks as little 
as it does Cicero. It is an amalgam of 
thrills, of sudden changes, of strange fire — 
all as in a very pure air. There is little or 
no humour, unless we think this is humor- 
ous: 

"Once Spirit was God; then it be- 
came man, now it is mob." 

"Concubinage has been corrupted by 
marriage." 

"It is a curious thing that God learned 
Greek when He wished to turn author, 
and that he did not learn it better." 

"The great moments of our life are 
at the points when we gain courage to 
rebaptise our badness as the best in 
us." 

He has a great gift of epigram. But his 
style, though brilliant, has no repose, and 
is fatiguing to read for long. Strings of 
aphorisms are rarely attractive. La Roche- 
foucauld had an ill influence on Nietzsche. 
He hoped to be a sort of super-Roche- 



248 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

foucauld. But he lacked the essential 
quality. He was not a man of the world. 
That is what distinguishes him alike from 
La Rochefoucauld and from Stendhal. His 
paradoxes and even his blasphemies are 
the difficult effort of a child trying to be 
naughty. He is not selfish enough to be 
profoundly cynical. There is always some- 
thing of the eternal undergraduate about 
Nietzsche. The undergraduate is not in- 
sincere. But he honestly believes himself 
more shocking than he is. He is astounded 
alike at his cleverness, his melancholy, 
and his profundity. A little later he 
learns that all clever young men go through 
this phase. But as compared with his 
French models Nietzsche is always too 
much of a preacher, too profoundly moral 
even in his immoralism. 

Yet he has great qualities. He lights 
up the bypaths of history and criticism. 
To glance through a volume of Nietzsche 
is to obtain a number of apergus on ev- 
erything under the sun, for nothing in 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 249 

heaven or earth but bears somehow upon 
the main theme — the future of culture. 
"Europe is necessary to me as a culture- 
museum," he said to his sister, when she 
wanted him to go and live in Paraguay. 
Nietzsche himself was a culture-museum. 
All peoples, nations, and languages he lays 
under contribution. In a few pages we 
come upon bits of criticism about music, 
about philosophy, from Buddha to Avena- 
rius, about poetry from the Vedas to 
Leopardi, about the theory of art, the 
goal of world politics, or the bearing of 
digestion upon authorship. His books are 
bright with many memories. Reading 
Nietzsche conveys a pleasing sense of 
familiarity with all that can be called cul- 
ture. That is as far as many people want 
to go. 

Probably it is the apocalyptic prophecy 
of a new age that wins him disciples, as 
distinct from admirers. He is, as we saw, 
essentially a prophet, a seer. People had 
got tired of the nineteenth century before 



250 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

it closed. At the outset of the twentieth 
they wanted not so much to be as to feel 
new. Nietzsche gave them this feeling. 
He is the John of the Baptism of the new 
kingdom. 

"Repent/' he might cry, "of your absurd 
morality. Rend all your garments, and 
live naked to the real wind. Rid your- 
self of shams; away with your conven- 
tional lies, your worship of comfort, your 
domestic pettiness, and above all your 
wallowing in pity. Be something. Look 
down, down on the herd, which you dis- 
own. Kill all this sentimental culture, 
this passion of the past, and join in the 
great gamble for the future, when every 
valley shall be a gulf, and every hill a 
Himalaya; when the crooked shall be 
twisted round, and the rough places be- 
come rocks. For Man, Man alone, shall 
be exalted in that day — for the Superman 
cometh, he cometh to judge the world, 
and with violence shall he rule the world 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 251 

and reprove with terror for the proud of 
the earth." 

This note of appeal to the will, this 
sense that mankind is in the making, 
ushered in the twentieth century. The 
spirit of scepticism, of decadence had 
hold of many, or else a mere conservatism. 
Nietzsche was like the wild northeaster, 
and he was, in his own words, "the voice 
of the day after to-morrow." 1 

On one side of its culture, the nineteenth 
century was pre-eminently the age of his- 
torical sentiment. This sentiment, the 
passion of the past, is a noble thing. It is 
not really a hopeful thing to try to throw 
away the achievements of the race. Yet 
historical interest may be overdone. Either 
it becomes mere sentimentalism, or culture 
becomes a jumble of memories. This is 
indicated by Nietzsche in a passage of 
Beyond Good and Evil: 

1 "Ich wiirde den hartesten Despotismus (als Schule fur die 
Geschmeidigkeit des Geistes) noch eher gut heissen, als die 
feuchte, laue Luft eines 'pressfreien' Zeitalters, in dem aller 
Geist bequem und dumm wird, und die Glieder streckt." 
(Nietzsche, WerJce, XIV, 397.) 



252 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

"This historical sense which we Euro- 
peans claim as our speciality has come 
to us in the train of the enchanting and 
mad semibarbarity into which Europe has 
been plunged by the democratic mingling 
of classes and races — it is only the nine- 
teenth century that has recognised this 
faculty as its sixth sense. Owing to this 
mingling, the past of every form and 
mode of life, and of cultures which were 
formerly closely contiguous and superim- 
posed on one another, flows forth into us 
modern souls; our instincts now run back 
in all directions, we ourselves are a kind 
of chaos; in the end, as we have said, the 
spirit perceives its advantage therein. 
By means of our semibarbarity in body 
and in desire we have secret access every- 
where, such as a noble age never had; we 
have access, above all, to the labyrinth 
of imperfect civilisations and to every 
form of semibarbarity that has at any 
time existed on earth; and in so far as 
the most considerable part of human 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 253 

civilisation hitherto has just been 'semi- 
barbarity,' the historical sense implies 
almost the sense and instinct for every- 
thing, the taste and tongue for every- 
thing; whereby it immediately proves it- 
self to be an ignoble sense. . . . Let us 
finally confess it, that what is most diffi- 
cult for us men of the 'historical sense' 
to grasp, feel, taste, and love, what finds 
us fundamentally prejudiced and almost 
hostile, is precisely the perfection and 
ultimate maturity in every culture and 
art, the essentially noble in works and 
men, their moment of smooth sea and 
halcyon self-sufficiency, the goldenness 
and coldness which all things show which 
have perfected themselves." x 

This ministers to the turning away from 
first-hand experience, and applies to all 
who look on life merely as spectators, like 
the Lady of Shalott, seeing only shadows 
in the mirror. The sense of this danger 

1 Beyond Good and Evil, 167, 169. 



254 THE WILL TO FBEEDOM 

was ever present with Nietzsche. It is 
expressed in the finest of the Essays Out 
of Season, and may be found also in the 
chapter of Zarathustra on "The Country 
of Culture." Further, an overgrowth of 
historical sentiment may lead to a throt- 
tling conservatism, and a refusal to cut 
new lines when they are needed, the at- 
tempt to solve problems essentially new 
by an appeal to precedent. Nietzsche re- 
fused, and by refusing strengthened the 
tendency to resist this. The present gen- 
eration is nervously anxious not to re- 
semble its parents. Thus it has found 
refreshment in Nietzsche's call to new 
adventure, and his effort to sum up the 
religion and culture of several millenniums. 
He gives the impression that we are now 
done with the era that began with Socrates, 
flowered into Christianity, and culminated 
in the French Revolution; that a new age 
of human culture is to begin, and that it 
is ours to make. 

To this end courage is needed, and a 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 255 

great soul; the sense that will is omnip- 
otent, that pain is irrelevant and indeed 
a tonic, and that we are tied to nothing. 
This appeal to the heroic, taking a thousand 
forms, and proclaimed with prophetic ur- 
gency came with force to an age, which 
believed itself only at the beginning of 
the conquest of the material world and 
sighed for the open air. It is an appeal 
essentially romantic, nor, if properly ex- 
plained, is it other than wholesome. 

Yet though it be romantic, it is or 
claims to be realist. That gives its force 
to Nietzsche's call to recognise morality 
for what it is, to look below the screen of 
language which conceals reality, to blow 
off with the wind of criticism the haze of 
sentiment, in which men disguise their 
egotism, to take account of force. This 
call came like a trumpet-call to an age 
dominated by Realpolitik, or else by an 
economic struggle, which is the same thing 
under the protection of the police. The 
fact that Nietzsche repudiated alike the 



256 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

economist's ideal and the statesman's only 
gave him a greater leverage. The Will to 
Power in its natural meaning has the sim- 
plicity and also the demerits of all purely 
cynical estimates. But it came as a re- 
lief to the languor induced by the moral 
scepticism of the fin de siecle. It assured 
many of the worth of life and courage 
without any taint of other-worldly idealism. 
Nietzsche appealed to a very powerful mo- 
tive, the sense of distinction. He addresses 
himself to the Higher Men. 

"Here is little of man; therefore women 
try to make themselves manly. For only 
he who is enough of a man will save the 
woman in woman." 1 

As we saw earlier, this notion of dis- 
tinction, so far from being denied, is in 
reality enhanced by the Christian doctrine 
of individual worth. Any writer is sure of 
a hearing who claims for his adherents 
the few, the rare spirits — just as a hotel 

1 Thus Syake Zarathustra, 248. 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 257 

may win the multitude by calling itself 
"the select hotel." Browning and Mere- 
dith owed something of their vogue to this 
form of snobbishness, and it frequently 
makes the fortune of some outrageous 
artist. Many people bought Browning 
not because to them he was delightful, 
but because to others he was difficult. 
Nietzsche owed much of his vogue to this 
desire to be thought superior, although 
neither in his nor in the other cases is it 
any measure of real worth. Most of his 
more clamorous disciples would disgust 
him, no less than the Browning Society 
disgusted the poet. For all that, intellec- 
tual and aesthetic coxcombry has found 
much on which to preen itself in Zarathus- 
tra. Neither riches nor birth in the usual 
sense are needed for Nietzsche's Higher 
Man. Any one, therefore, who feels so 
disposed, can claim that he has the char- 
acteristics of the future lords of the world. 
The following passages serve to illustrate 
this: 



258 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

"Such accusers of life — they are over- 
come by life with a blinking of the eye. 
'Thou lovest me ? ' saith the impudent one. 
'Wait a little; I have no time yet for thee.' 

"Man is the cruellest animal towards 
himself. And in all who call themselves 
'sinners' and 'bearers of the cross' and 
'penitents,' ye shall not fail to hear the 
lust contained in that complaining and 
accusing ! 

"And myself? — will I thereby be the 
accuser of man? Alas, mine animals, 
that alone I have learnt hitherto, that 
the wickedest in man is necessary for 
the best in him; that all that is wicked, 
is his best power and the hardest stone 
unto the highest creator; and that man 
must become better and more wicked. 

"Not unto that stake of torture was 
I fixed, that I know: man is wicked. 
But I cried, as no one hath ever cried: 
'Alas, that his wickedest is so very small ! 
Alas, that his best is so very small ! ' 

"The great loathing of man — it choked 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 259 

me, it had crept into my throat, and 
what the fortune-teller foretold: 'All is 
equal, nothing is worth while, knowledge 
choketh.' 

"A long dawn limped in front of me, 
a sadness weary unto death, drunken 
from death, and speaking with a yawn- 
ing mouth. 

"Eternally he recurreth, man, of whom 
thou weariest, the small man. Thus 
yawned my sadness and dragged its 
foot and could not fall asleep." l 

" 'Of the convicts guilty of riches, 
who collect their profit out of all rub- 
bish heaps, with cool eyes and volup- 
tuous thoughts — of that rabble that 
stinketh unto heaven, 

"'Of that gilded-over, falsified mob, 
whose fathers were thieves or birds of 
carrion, or rag-gatherers with wives com- 
plaisant, voluptuous, and forgetful (for 
none of them hath a far way to go to 
become a whore); 

1 Ibid., p. 326. 



260 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

"'Mob at the top, mob below ! What 
are to-day "poor" and "rich"? This 
distinction have I unlearnt. Then I 
fled away, further, ever further, until 
I came unto these cows.' 

"Thus spake the peaceful one, and 
snuffed himself, and perspired over his 
words, so that the cows wondered again. 
But Zarathustra, all the time the man 
was speaking so bitterly, gazed with a 
smile into his face, and silently shook 
his head. 

" 'Thou dost violence unto thyself, 
thou mount-preacher, in using such bitter 
words. For such bitterness neither thy 
mouth nor thine eye was made. 

" 'Nor, methinketh, even thy stomach. 
Unto it all such anger and hatred and 
overflowing are repugnant. Thy stomach 
desireth gentler things. Thou art not a 
butcher. 

" 'Thou rather seemest unto me to 
be an eater of plants and roots. Perhaps 
thou grindest corn. But certainly thou 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 261 

art averse from the pleasures of the 
flesh and thou lovest honey.' "* 

Immoralism is always attractive. Free- 
dom from dependence on any kind of au- 
thority has charm for many. The Nietzsche 
worshipper is peculiarly happy. Not only 
is he at liberty to bait Christians 2 — a com- 
mon pastime for the intellectual — but he 
can pour scorn on the solemn academic 
moralists who have often supposed them- 
selves to be new, because they are infidels. 
Nietzsche laughs at them and says that 
they are Christians without the excuse of 
faith, and condemns all under the rubric 
of the spirit of gravity. What he says 
about the spirit of gravity is true. Pious 
folk would do well to note this. 

That charm as of naughtiness, the toy- 
smashing child, stands for much. But it 

1 IHd., p. 401. 

2 "II est permis de penser que son antichristianisme en morale 
fut l'un des auxiliaires les plus precieux de la renommee tardive 
du philosophe qui intitule a l'antichretien sa derniere production 
litteraire. La morale chretienne comme les choses tres anciennes 
et tres melees a la vie a tant d'ennemis conscients ou inconscients. 
Les tendances ne furent pas etrangeres sans doute a l'interven- 
tion de M. Brandes." (Seillieres, Apollon ou Dionysos, 210.) 



262 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

is not all. Many persons had been direct- 
ing their lives to ends deliberately anti- 
Christian. Such men were rejoiced when 
a writer of power and passion expressed 
their feelings. Others were pleased with 
his attacks on priests. They have a pleasur- 
able malice in this superior form of amuse- 
ment known in Paris as epater le bourgeois. 
Others, without sharing their convictions 
are stimulated. Indeed, the thrill of 
Nietzsche is possible to many who have 
no mind for his philosophy. 

What that thrill precisely is it is hard 
to say. It is not mere poetry; nor proph- 
ecy; nor his terrific sincerity; nor his vi- 
sion; nor his acuteness of criticism, his 
amazing variety; nor his iridescent epi- 
gram. Probably it is something personal. 
His bewildering changes, the kaleidoscopic 
quality adds to that sense of exhilaration, 
as of drinking champagne, with which he 
is read. True, his nerves are naked. But 
nowadays people like naked nerves. 

Dionysos is his own word for it — the 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 

spirit of the dancer. I could not believe, 
he said, in a God who could not dance. 
In this once more he is nearer to Chris- 
tianity than he knew. There is an interest- 
ing mediaeval poem in which the whole 
plan of salvation is entitled "The general 
dance." It is as the tight-rope dancer 
living dangerously on a line strung be- 
tween precipices amid eternal snows that 
Nietzsche is so much of a "wonder, a 
beauty, and a terror." In a new age, very 
childlike, he calls to all with the spirit of 
youth, to try all experiments, to shrink 
back neither for fear nor for love, neither 
for God nor for man, neither for good nor 
for evil. This call, together with his 
strange, mystical sense of the eternal in 
the transient and, therefore, the value of 
the moment; this paradox of the ungodly 
who yet worships, of the immoralist who 
preaches self-control, of the Antichrist 
who could mount the Cross, the icono- 
clast who could yet set up a religion, this 
it is which gives to Friedrich Nietzsche a 



264 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

charm that will outlast all the febrile 
puerilities of his attack on Christianity 
and all the superficial snobbery of his 
contempt for the common man. One of 
the best illustrations will be found in the 
"Song of the Seven Seals": 

"If I myself am a grain of that re- 
deeming salt that maketh all things mix 
well in the vessel of mixture; 

"(For there is a salt that bringeth 
together what is good and what is evil; 
and even the wickedest is worthy of 
serving as seasoning and as a means for 
the last foaming-over.) 

"Oh! how could I fail to be eager for 
eternity and for the marriage ring of 
rings, the ring of recurrence? 

"Never yet have I found the woman 
by whom I should have liked to have 
children, unless it be this woman I love. 
For I love thee, O Eternity! 

"For I love thee, Eternity ! 

"If I am fond of the sea, and of all 



THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 265 

that is of the sea's kin, and if I am 
fondest if it contradicteth me angrily; 

"If that seeking lust is within me 
that driveth the sails after the undis- 
covered; if there is a sailor's lust in my 
lust; 

"If my rejoicing hath ever cried: 'The 
shore hath disappeared ! Now the last 
chain hath fallen down from me ! 

* ' * The limitless roareth round me ! Far, 
far away shine unto me space and time ! 
Up ! upward, old heart !' 

"Oh ! how could I fail to be eager for 
eternity and for the marriage ring of 
rings, the ring of recurrence? 

"Never yet have I found the woman 
by whom I should have liked to have 
children, unless it be this woman I love. 
For I love thee, O Eternity ! 

"For I love thee, Eternity!" 1 

nbid., p. 344. 



VI 

THE DANGER AND THE SIGNIFICANCE 
OF NIETZSCHE 

Certain dangers attach to the doctrine 
of Nietzsche. Whether or no the writer 
intended them is irrelevant. They arise 
naturally out of his teaching, provided 
men are found to take in earnest his claim 
to be a moral revolutionary. Every teacher 
must be held responsible for the natural 
consequences of his teaching, however 
little he intended all of them. Some of 
these consequences Nietzsche did intend. 
Others he did not. In any case Nietzsche 
is guilty of them unless he took pains to 
avoid them. Moreover it is not certain 
that the more extreme interpretation of 
his doctrine is wrong. In his work on 
The Quintessence of Nietzsche, Mr. J. M. 
Kennedy propounds the following genial 
suggestion for the treatment of the poor: 

266 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 267 

"It will in time inevitably be recog- 
nised that the distinction between mas- 
ters and slaves must be made more 
apparent, must be more generally ad- 
mitted than it now is. Instead of the 
lowest classes in society receiving wages 
and keeping up their pseudo-indepen- 
dence, they must be trained to submit 
themselves as property." 1 

The two completed plays of the late 
John Davidson's Mammon Trilogy are even 
surer evidence. Mr. Davidson thought that 
Nietzsche did not go far enough. Still, 
of the source of his doctrine of triumphant 
power reintroducing the rack there can be 
no question. Much of Nietzsche can be 
interpreted in a less barbarous way. But 
his own professed disciples afford evi- 
dence that for the most part this interpre- 
tation is non-natural. A German, Doctor 
Brahm, has written this year a pamphlet 
to prove that the Germans, and more espe- 

1 Kennedy, The Quintessence of Nietzsche, 347. 



268 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

cially Hindenburg, have full right to the 
privileges of the superman. 1 

Some of the dangers lurking in his doc- 
trine Nietzsche seems to have felt. Hence 
his oft-repeated assertion that his writings 
(in the final period) are directed solely to 
the master class of the future. That 
proviso cannot help him. Since this class 
is to be recruited from all higher men 
irrespective of existing social arrangements, 
any one may deem himself a higher man, 
"beyond good and evil." 

The first danger is an unbridled in- 
dividualism. Nietzsche's assertion that 
morality is due to the herd instinct is 
coupled with the view that the higher 
man, and still more the superman of the 
future, is by the law of his being released 

1 " Wie der Genius alle Kultur rechtfertigt, so ist es denn schliess- 
lich auch die letzte Form der Heiligung der Kriegesclasse ohne 
die der militarische Genius nicht geschaffen wurde. Wenn ge- 
rade in den Zeiten des Krieges so haufig auffallt dass ein Mann 
wie Hindenburg dahin gegangen ware, ohne seine letzten Quali- 
ty ten zum Ausdruck gebracht zu haben, ware der Krieg nicht 
gekommen, so meint Nietzsche genau das Gleiche wenn er den 
Krieg schon daraus rechtfertigt, dass er dem militarischen Genius 
die Moglichkeit der Entfaltung gibt." (Brahm. Friedrich 
Nietzsches Meinungen.) 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 269 

from all these restrictions. This doctrine 
forms and is bound to form an incentive 
to oppression. Every little poetaster may 
fancy himself one of the select. An able 
man may justify almost any breach of 
social obligation by an appeal to Nietzsche. 
Speaking once of a certain course of con- 
duct pursued by an able man as base, I 
was met by the rejoinder: "I think 
Nietzsche would have approved of it." 
The temptations to men of talent to win 
success by crooked methods are strong. 
In all ages many give way to them. 
Hitherto such lapses have been blamed. 
Now they can be justified by the authority 
of a great name. Nietzsche admitted that 
according to all existing standards his su- 
perman is a criminal. 

True, Nietzsche made clear that he did 
not teach what in the narrower sense is 
called license. Yet the Christian ideal 
of chastity he treats with scorn. His 
disciples may claim to be excused, if they 
go somewhat farther than their master. 



270 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

Once teach that all moral restraints are 
without meaning save for the herd, and 
it is no wonder if men place upon this a 
sinister application. Gabriele d'Annunzio 
is a professed follower of Nietzsche. The 
ideal which is stated or implied in his 
works needs no description. Nietzsche 
may not himself be guilty of affirming such 
perversity. Yet he can hardly be acquitted 
of having furthered it. 

Let us pass on to consequences, which 
are more direct. Egoism he admits to 
be a quality of greatness. Even this is 
susceptible of a decent meaning, if we 
understand by it that an individual has 
his own end and is something more than 
a cog in the social machine. Altruism with- 
out qualification is ultimately destruc- 
tive of individuality. Yet this minimis- 
ing interpretation is far from obvious. 
Nietzsche's own admiration of Napoleon, 1 

1 The author of the pamphlet mentioned before makes a not 
unfair use of this fact to justify his identification of Hindenburg 
with the superman: 

"Alexander J -n Grossen, Casar, Napoleon, spater auch Bis- 
marck, zit' :c er wohl ofter als Shakespeare und Goethe." 
(Brahm, Iriedrich Nietzsches Meinungen iiber Staate und Krieqe.) 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 271 

and still more of Machiavelli's hero, Cesare 
Borgia, does not favour such a gloss. His 
teaching appears to justify the utmost 
ruthlessness and treachery, if only it be 
displayed by the strong. Nietzsche de- 
spised the Philistine ideal of riches. Yet 
the question as to who is the superman or 
the forerunner of the superman is a ques- 
tion of fact. Even the Pope does not 
claim to be infallible in matters of fact. 
The point is not, who is the superman? but 
what may the person do who has reason 
to think himself such? Once Nietzsche's 
moral of the exploitation of the weak by 
the strong is accepted as a principle, any 
individual or group of individuals may 
say: "I, or at least my children, will be 
supermen. We therefore are beyond good 
and evil. Greatness, according to our 
Master, always goes along with social 
wickedness. Any means are right, if they 
lead to the supreme end. Therefore we 
are benefiting society, or at least ages to 
come, if we treat the mass of men with 



272 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

contempt and throw to the winds all 
thoughts of pity or honesty." The non- 
moral company promoter, who achieves 
eminence in riches, by eminence in lying, 
the organisers of the slave trade, the op- 
pressors of native races, the promoters of 
the Putumayo atrocities, all these might 
be condemned by Nietzsche himself. Yet 
they would find excuse in his principles: 

"The way in which one has to treat 
raw savages and the impossibility of 
dispensing with barbarous methods be- 
comes obvious in practice when one 
is transplanted, with all one's European 
pampering, to a spot such as the Congo, 
or anywhere else where it is necessary 
to maintain one's mastery over bar- 
barians. 

"Warlike and peaceful people. — Art 
thou a man who has the instincts of a 
warrior in thy blood? If this be so, 
another question must be put. Do thy 
instincts impel thee to attack or to 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 273 

defend? The rest of mankind, all those 
whose instincts are not warlike, desire 
peace, concord, ' freedom,' 'equal rights': 
these things are but names and steps 
for one and the same thing. Such men 
only wish to go where it is not neces- 
sary for them to defend themselves — 
such men become discontented with them- 
selves when they are obliged to offer 
resistance; they would fain create cir- 
cumstances in which war is no longer 
necessary. If the worst came to the 
worst, they would resign themselves, 
obey, and submit; all these things are 
better than waging war — thus does the 
Christian's instinct, for instance, whisper 
to him. In the born warrior's character 
there is something of armour, likewise 
in the choice of his circumstances and 
in the development of every one of his 
qualities: weapons are best evolved by 
the latter type, shields are best devised 
by the former. 

"What expedients and what virtues 



274 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

do the unarmed and the undefended 
require in order to survive, and even to 
conquer?" * 

Instead of the humanisation of society, 
the getting rid of the habit of treating men 
as tools, "hands," we shall have all these 
evils enhanced a thousandfold — except in 
so far as they reduce the quantum of 
production. That this is so is shewn by 
the passage quoted above about the lower 
classes becoming mere property — perhaps 
the basest of all political ideals. It ipso 
facto denies them the quality of men. 
Worse dangers attach to Nietzsche's doc- 
trine. It may seem commonplace to quote 
his words to warriors. But his words about 
loving peace "as a means to new wars" 
and "a good war justifying any cause" 2 
are not so easily susceptible of a spiritual 

1 The Will to Power, II, 342. 

2 " Ye shall love peace as a means to new wars, and the short 
peace better than the long. 

" I do not advise you to work, but to fight. I do not advise you 
to conclude peace, but to conquer. Let your work be a fight and 
your peace a victory. 

" Ye say a good cause will hallow even war ? I say unto you a 
good war halloweth every cause." Zarathustra, p. 60. 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 275 

interpretation as the defenders of Nietzsche 
suppose. Even if they do refer to war- 
fare of ideas, it is fair to say that when 
ideas get embodied in societies this war- 
fare will be something more barbaric than 
mere debate. 1 Moreover, we must take 
also into account what he says elsewhere: 

"Our psychologists, whose glance 
dwells involuntarily upon the symptoms 
of decadence, lead us to mistrust in- 
tellect ever more and more. People 
persist in seeing only the weakening, 
pampering, and sickening effects of in- 
tellect, but there are now going to ap- 
pear: 

'The union of 

" Cynics intellectual 

New Experimen- J superiority 

barbarians | talists, | and of an 

t Conquerors: overflow of 

strength. 

1 The following passage seems to favour the view that Nietz- 
sche might be referring to the warfare of ideas: 

"Neue Form der Gemeinschaft: sich kriegerisch behauptend. 
Sonst wird der Geist matt. Keine 'Garten' und blosses Aus- 



276 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

"I point to something new: certainly 
for such a democratic community there 
is a danger of barbarians; but these 
are sought only down below. There is 
also another hind of barbarians who come 
from the heights: a kind of conquering 
and ruling natures, which are in search 
of material that they can mould. Prome- 
theus was a barbarian of this stamp. 

"Principal standpoint: one should not 
suppose the mission of a higher species 
to be the leading of inferior men (as 
Comte does, for instance); but the in- 
ferior should be regarded as the founda- 
tion upon which a higher species may 
live their higher life — upon which alone 
they can stand" * 

"We must understand the fundamental 
artistic phenomenonVhich is called 'Life' 
— the formative spirit, which contracts 

weichen vor den Massen. Krieg (aber ohne Pulver) ! zwischen 
verschiedenen Gedanken ! und deren Heeren. 

"Neuer Adel, durch Zuchtung. Die Grundungs-Feste von 
Familien. 

"Der Tag neu eingetheilt: die korperlichen Ubungen fur aller 
Lebensalter. Der Wettkampf als Princip." {Werke, XII, 368.) 

1 The Will to Power, 329. 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 277 

under the most unfavourable circum- 
stances: and in the slowest manner 
possible. The proof of all its combina- 
tions must first be given afresh: it main- 
tains itself. 

"Sexuality, lust of dominion, the plea- 
sure derived from appearance and decep- 
tion, great and joyful gratitude to Life 
and its typical conditions — these things 
are essential to all Paganism, and it 
has a good conscience on its side. That 
which is hostile to Nature (already in 
Greek antiquity) combats Paganism in 
the form of morality and dialectics. 

"An antimetaphysical view of the 
world — yes, but an artistic one. 

"Apollo's misapprehension: the eter- 
nity of beautiful forms, the aristocratic 
prescription, ' Thus shall it ever be I ' 

"Dionysos: Sensuality and cruelty. 
The perishable nature of existence might 
be interpreted as the joy of procreative 
and destructive force, as unremitting 
creation" 1 

1 Ibid., 415. 



278 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

"Such men as Napoleon must always 
return and always settle our belief in 
the self-glory of the individual afresh: 
he himself, however, was corrupted by 
the means he had to stoop to, and had 
lost noblesse of character. If he had had 
to prevail among another kind of men, 
he could have availed himself of other 
means; and thus it would not seem 
necessary that a Caesar must become bad, 

"Man is a combination of the beast 
and the superbeast; higher man a com- 
bination of the monster and the super- 
man; 1 these opposites belong to each 
other. With every degree of a man's 
growth towards greatness and loftiness 
he also grows downward into the depths 
and into the terrible: we should not 
desire the one without the other; or, 
better still, the more fundamentally we 
desire the one, the more completely we 
shall achieve the other. 

1 The play on the German words, "Unthier" and "iTberthier," 
"Unmensch" and "tJbermensch," is unfortunately not translat- 
able.— Tr. 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 279 

"Terribleness belongs to greatness: let 
us not deceive ourselves. 

"I have taught the knowledge of such 
terrible things that all 'Epicurean con- 
tentment' is impossible concerning them. 
Dionysian pleasure is the only adequate 
kind here: I was the first to discover the 
tragic. Thanks to their superficiality 
in ethics, the Greeks misunderstood it. 
Resignation is not the lesson of tragedy, 
but only the misunderstanding of it ! 
The yearning for nonentity is the denial 
of tragic wisdom, its opposite !" * 

If we add to this that he seems to at- 
tribute to this new, or rather old, god Diony- 
sos the qualities of barbarism and sensual- 
ity, we may anticipate a fine crop of hor- 
rors if any persons or group of persons gets 
hold of the notion that he is Ubermensch, 
or tlbervolk. Si monumentum quceris, cir- 
cumspice. That person or group might, 
in Nietzsche's own judgment, be far from 

1 Ibid., 405. 



280 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

qualifying for the title. None the less 
could he excuse on Nietzsche's principles 
any ruse and every ruthless act. 

Nietzsche said, when attacking Christian- 
ity, that its evil quality was not of necessity 
tied to that other worldly faith which he 
denied. That might be harmless enough, 
if only Christianity had not reversed the 
natural order of values and denied rank. 
Nietzsche's own principles should be ap- 
plied here. Nominal Christians may be 
foand who try to adapt their faith to the 
notion of a conquering race, which is in 
all but name the same as that of Nietzsche. 
Houston Stewart Chamberlain in the Foun- 
dations of the Nineteenth Century affords a 
cardinal instance of this. That work de- 
nies that humanity means anything at 
all, declaring all truth to lie in race-tyranny. 
He prophesies a new triumph for a reju- 
venated Christianity, embodying the idea 
of a race-superiority. The import of Cham- 
berlain's Nietzscheanised Christianity has 
recently become plain. Chamberlain is 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 281 

not himself an admirer of Nietzsche. That 
does not affect the argument. 

To take one more instance. Nietzsche 
was no lover of any existing state; still 
less of any form of nationalism. He de- 
clared the modern state to be that in which 
the slow suicide of all is called life. He 
regarded it as the refuge of the much too 
many, a dangerous means for helping the 
weak at the expense of the strong, thereby 
retarding that cosmopolitan Paradise in 
which the good European should be master, 
supported in a life of virtue, free from 
moralic acid, resting on a pyramid of 
slaves. What he says of the state in Zara- 
ihustra may be cited. 

"What I call the state is where all 
are poison-drinkers, the good and the 
evil alike. What I call the state is where 
all lose themselves, the good and the 
evil alike. What I call the state is where 
the slow suicide of all is called 'life.' " x 

1 Zarathustra, 64. 



282 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

Yet, on the other hand, his root principle 
is the will to power. Elsewhere he defines 
the state. 

"The state, or unmorality organised, 

is from within — the police, the penal 

J code, status, commerce, and the family; 

and from without, the will to war, to 

power, to conquest, and revenge. 

"A multitude will do things an in- 
dividual will not, because of the division 
of responsibility, of command, and exe- 
cution; because the virtues of obedience, 
duty, patriotism, and local sentiment 
are all introduced; because feelings of 
pride, severity, strength, hate, and re- 
venge — in short, all typical traits are 
upheld, and these are characteristics 
utterly alien to the herd-man." * 

"The maintenance of the military 
state is the last means of adhering to 
the great tradition of the past, or, where 
it has been lost, to revive it. By means 
of it the superior or strong type of man 

1 The WiU to Power, 184. 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 283 

is preserved, and all institutions and 
ideas which perpetuate enmity and order 
of rank in states, such as national feel- 
ing, protective tariffs, etc., may on that 
account seem justified." 1 

Further, in politics, according to Nietz- 
sche, perfection is to be found only on purely 
Machiavellian principles. He definitely 
prophesied the coming of that savagery 
so well named by M. Cambon "La barbarie 
pedante." 2 

Is it not, then, obvious what is likely to 
happen if any state or nation adopts his 
views? It can assert that the State is 
Power, nothing else but Power. It can 
believe with Nietzsche that power is the 
one end of life. It may go on to proclaim 
itself free from all restraints in dealing 
with enemies and from every kind of 
limitation in dealing with its subjects or 

1 Ibid., 189. "Die allgemeine Militarpflichtigkeit ist schon 
heute das sonderbare Gegengift gegen die Weichlichkeit der de- 
mokratischea Ideen." (Nietzsche. Nachtrag, 8, 497.) 

2 " Ein Zeitalter der Barbarei beginnt, die Wissenschaften wer- 
den ihm dienen." (Werke, XII, 334.) 



284 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

with religious and economic groups. Such 
was the inspiring motive of Napoleon, 
Nietzsche's ideal, the most gigantic egotist 
whom the world has ever known. 

What we need to bear in mind is this: 
The question of fact as to where the germ 
of supermanity resides is one thing, and 
will be decided by each individual or 
group in accordance with its own wishes. 
If that question be decided in the affirma- 
tive, Nietzsche's ethic gives him a right to 
despise any kind of restraint, to claim 
everything as his due; to perpetrate bar- 
barities and treacheries; to exploit the rest 
of the world as tools. On this ground it is 
hardly unfair to say that Nietzsche's doc- 
trine is one of grave practical danger, 
however deeply Nietzsche might have 
despised those who would put it to the 
proof. Nietzsche's doctrine is a spirit 
rather than a code. Despite all qualifica- 
tions, it is the spirit of pride in mere power, 
which believes that for powerful individuals 
or classes, and for these alone, "nothing is 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 285 

true, all things are permitted" ; which would 
deny all inherent reality to other persons 
or groups, treating them as things, as in- 
deed on the naturalistic hypothesis they are. 
Barbarism, however, is not the greatest 
danger of Nietzsche. His attack on mere 
peaceful domesticity is a reaction against 
a sophisticated culture. It may be claimed, 
even if it cannot be proved, that he is 
merely advocating a tragic view of life, 
with its due place for austerity. Alike in 
education and the state, a certain process 
of hardening is needful to manhood. His 
fear lest Europe should become a sort of 
China is not ignoble. How dull and 
Philistine appear to us the ideals of the 
mid-century utilitarians with their "bag- 
man's Paradise"! Nietzsche represents the 
reaction against that. We need not alto- 
gether blame him if he expressed himself 
with misleading violence. Even his at- 
tack on pity is intended mainly as a rebuke 
to that sentimentalism in regard to pain 
which has tended to ruin discipline in 



THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

home, school, and state and to produce 
certain propaganda, such as vegetarianism 
on humanitarian grounds, or the more dan- 
gerous forms of Pacifism. Nietzsche, as 
we have said, agrees with Christianity in 
holding that fulness of life is the true aim, 
and that is never reached without suffering 
and, indeed, is sometimes stimulated by 
pain. 

Nietzsche's danger is deeper than any 
apparent barbarism. It lies in the cult of 
pride, which he tends to stimulate. The 
young gentleman at college who prides 
himself on true culture will easily believe 
himself to be of the "artist-rulers." Among 
all men of gifts there is a tendency, only 
with difficulty kept down, to despise the 
mass of men. This tendency can be re- 
strained only by much intercourse with 
those whose gifts are real but different. 
As life goes on, men tend more and more 
to associate with those of a like calling, 
artists, the professions, politics, writing, 
warfare, and so forth. This check is then 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 287 

removed. The real danger of a philosophy 
of pride becomes apparent, and it can be 
seen to-day in the tone of contempt adopted 
by many modern critics towards any 
fashion in art and literature and philosophy 
which they do not happen to like. Nietzsche 
has stimulated all this by encouraging the 
individual with gifts to set himself against 
all authority. Probably he did not in- 
tend it, yet the undoubted effect of his 
influence is to stimulate excessive individ- 
ualism in regard to all the higher things of 
the mind. Indeed, to many Nietzsche 
stands for such individualism, and for noth- 
ing else. Yet it was French culture with its 
genius for order which he admired most. 

The main evil is, as was said in an earlier 
lecture, that Nietzsche, Prussian 1 most cer- 
tainly in this respect, insists on concen- 
trating attention on Power. However 
much of interpretation we may put upon 

1 "Diese Harte gegen sich, diese Unterordnung unter die Auf- 
gabe, ist sie nicht preussisch-deutscher Geist? Hat man nicht 
Nietzsches geistiges Milieurecht das geistige Potsdam genannt?" 
(Brahm, 26.) 



288 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

his writings, we cannot do away with the 
radical distinction between a gospel of 
Power and a gospel of Freedom. The fact 
that some think Nietzsche's gospel is to 
be understood "in a spiritual sense," so 
far from mitigating, only deepens the evil. 
A gospel of Power must lead on the part 
either of the individual or the class to a 
theory of egoism, of pride, and of tyranny. 
It is in its essence exclusive. A gospel of 
Freedom, must equally of course lead to 
a doctrine of tolerance, of humility; for 
freedom implies the recognition of others — 
power pure and simple is satisfied to use 
them as tools. The ideal of the one is 
embodied in the Roman conception of the 
Imperium in the head of the state, and of 
the absolute power over life and limb of 
the individual master over his "familia." 
The ideal of the other is for ever incarnate 
in the Christian doctrine of the State, 
as made up of more than one authority, 
of which each must respect the other be- 
cause each is Divine, and in the Christian 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 289 

conception of the individual, as having a 
limited freedom and bound by the golden 
rule, because "one is your Father and all 
ye are brethren." The one doctrine sepa- 
rates the man or class or state in whom Power 
is vested from all others, and superimposes 
it on the rest. The other recognises head- 
ship and inequality and rule, but all as 
a part of the membership "one of an- 
other," which is the essence alike of true 
citizenship and real churchmanship. Noth- 
ing can relieve Nietzsche from the stain 
of having stimulated the tendencies, al- 
ready sufficiently strong, towards that es- 
sential evil of Paganism which we see 
at its worst in Nero and at its best in 
Diocletian. The Italian tyrants of the 
Renaissance, refined and cruel, are the 
true comment on this doctrine. It is not 
an otiose point that it is in such men that 
Nietzsche found the nearest approach to 
his ideal. 1 It is no defence to say that he 

1 He does in one place seem to imply that his master-class may 
live as careless Epicurean gods: 

"Es ist durchaus nicht das Ziel die letzteren als die Herren 



THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

did not approve the material tortures, and 
that the "splendid blond beast" he only- 
honoured in the past. For it is clear that, if 
he honoured the qualities displayed by 
these, he was deeper in his worship of them 
than one who only admired their power. 
The Mammon of John Davidson gives us 
the measure. 

Nietzsche is a good tonic, but a bad 
food. Let us, finally, try to estimate the 
significance of Nietzsche. What will be 
his place in the history of European culture 
we cannot at this date predict. Some 
things, however, are certain. His im- 
portance lies in the fact that he heralded 
the break-up of the nineteenth century. 
He prophesied and partly produced the 
shattering of those ideals which seemed 
almost self-evident in that great move- 
ment which culminated in the Exhibition 
of 1851; Tennyson was the creature of 
his age, and spoke of the time: 

der ersteren aufzufassen, sondern es sollte zwei Arten neben- 
einander bestehen — moglichst getrennt, die eine wie die epi- 
kurischen Gotter sich urn die andre nicht kummernd." 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 291 

When the war-drum throbbed no longer, and 

the battle-flag was furled 
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of 

the world. 

Tennyson, himself (and many others) be- 
came disillusioned. In "Locksley Hall," 
sixty years after, he left the record of 
this. All those ideals have exhibited their 
emptiness. Men have seen, as Carlyle 
and Ruskin said they would, that mere 
competition for money is no security for 
the higher goods of human culture. The 
problem of the poor, so far from being 
solved by the grant of the vote, is seen to 
be more terrific than ever. We contrast 
with the modern proletariat the happier 
lot of the feudal serf of the Middle Ages, 
who had his land, and by Magna Charta 
was secured in his "wainage." This dis- 
illusion has taken in many the form of 
socialism. In others it has become a sad 
conservatism, quite unlike the joyous tory- 
ism of old, which harked back to feudal 
ideals: — we see this sceptical disillusion 
in writers like Sir Henry Maine. Nietzsche 



292 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

expressed this disillusion, but he went 
beyond it. His gift to the world is a gospel 
of hope. 1 He allows many people to hope, 
who, having given up the supernatural, 
would otherwise have sunk into gloom. 
War, also, it has been thought, would be 
shown to be a chimera, because it is so 
expensive. A rationalist world would settle 
down to eternal mutton-chops. Nietzsche 
saw through this falsity. So far from all 
grounds of quarrel coming to an end with 
the growth of great aggregations, they have 
increased. Now there has dawned upon 
men's minds the prospect of world-domin- 
ion. Here Nietzsche was prophetic. 2 

" The time for petty politics is past; the 
next century will bring the struggle for the 



1 "Und nun nachdem wir lange dergestalt unterwege waren, 
wir Argonauten des Ideals, muthiger vielleicht als klug ist, und 
oft genug schiffbriichig und zu Schaden gekommen, aber wie 
gesagt, gesiinder als man es uns erlauben mochte, gefahrlich- 
gesund — immer wieder gesund — will es uns scheinen, als ob wir, 
zum Lohn dafiir, ein noch unentdecktes Land vor uns haben, 
dessen Grenzen noch Niemand abgesehen hat, ein Jenseits aller 
bisherigen Lander und Winkel des Ideals, eine Welt so uberreich 
an Schonem, Fremdem, Fragwiirdigem, Furchtbarem und Gott- 
lichem, dass unsere Neugierde, sowohl als unser Besitzdurst 
ausser sich gerathen sind — ach, dass wir nun durch Nichts mehr 
zu ersattigen sind." (Leben, II, 450.) 

2 Beyond Good and Evil, 146. 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 293 

dominion of the world — the compulsion to 
great politics." 

Nor is it easy to suppose, that words 
like this have been without effect in stim- 
ulating this desire for world-hegemony. 

Nietzsche will occupy a place in the 
history of political ideals. Mr. Carlyle 
in the first chapter of his History of Political 
Theory in the West, describes the change 
that came over political thought between 
Aristotle and Cicero. Partly as a result 
of the conquests of Alexander and the 
Hellenisation of Asia and Egypt, partly 
from the beginnings of the Roman Empire, 
men had begun to believe in a cosmopoli- 
tan world-citizenship, based on that funda- 
mental likeness between man and man of 
which Stoic and Christian ideals were the 
expression. This notion was at the back of 
the minds of the great Roman lawyers, who 
always asserted that slavery was a thing 
of convention and opposed to the law of 
nature. That belief held Europe until 
the French Revolution. It had much to 



294 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

do with the feudal system, for in theory 
the serf differs toto ccelo from the slave. 
The church, which was opposed to slavery, 
had no objection to serfdom. There was 
nothing un-Christian in the feudal theory 
of the peasant. With the revived study 
of Roman law in the Middle Ages and 
the Renaissance, the old evil reappeared, 
for lawyers began to work out logically 
the statements of the Code and the Digest. 
Since the serf was unfree, he was to be 
denied personality and treated as purely 
a chattel. That condition was partly 
the cause of the Peasants' Revolt in Eng- 
land, and later on of the Peasant War in 
Germany. There, as a result of Luther's 
influence, the lot of the peasant became 
worse for three centuries. Yet he was 
not denied altogether the rights of human- 
ity. "Eh, Nangis, ce sont des hommes," 
was the reply even of an autocrat like 
Louis XIV when one of his dukes asked 
him why he did not execute all deserters. 
Despite many inconsistencies, that senti- 
ment remained unchanged. It helped to 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 295 

produce the French Revolution; it ended 
the slave-trade, and ultimately slavery. 

Precisely at the moment of its triumph, 
this movement suffered a setback. Mod- 
ern capitalism shewed the evils of an ex- 
ploited proletariat. Men began to ask 
in what way, save the name of freedom, 
the modern wage-slave was better off than 
his predecessor, the chattel. Some would 
end this by a revolution. Others were 
willing to accept its essential fact, the 
exploitation of the many for the higher 
life of the few. Possibilities of Empire 
over black and yellow races raised once 
more the problem of racial differences. 
Darwin, too, and belief in heredity helped 
in the same direction. It was seen that 
nations could not be held together without 
authority, and that breed was a fact. 
Democracy in so far as it implies an ab- 
solute individualism, irrespective of blood, 
is not justified on the principles of evolu- 
tion and heredity. The political fact of 
the consolidation of modern Germany by a 
military monarchy was a further stimulus. 



THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

Nietzsche is important in that he ex- 
presses and sums up a new critical atti- 
tude and calls men back to doctrines of 
the natural inequality of man. Doubt- 
less, he owed much to his admired Gobi- 
neau and his work on The Inequality of 
Races. The tendency nowadays is to re- 
gard not the individual, but the group, as 
the social unit. This in itself is not con- 
trary to Christianity, which never taught 
an absolute individualism and lays stress 
on the family. Nor is it even contrary to 
the present direction of social reform, 
which more and more tends to pay regard 
to the numerous groups which make up 
the nation, and to treat men as members of 
such bodies. It is easy to connect it with 
eugenics and the effort to limit the multi- 
plication of those whom Nietzsche ridicules 
as "the botched and bungled." This 
may be done without that violence of 
pride and selfishness which Nietzsche ap- 
plauds. Whether this tendency be right 
or wrong, it exists. Nietzsche is among 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 297 

the most important influences which have 
developed it. 

Another point is of even more note, 
although it is less obvious. Mere freedom 
without any restrictions is not possible 
in any society. The anarchy of the purely 
individualist ideal of the last century is 
becoming apparent in moral, intellectual, 
and artistic matters, and in social and 
political spheres it affords no pleasing 
prospect. Nietzsche's task, we must ever 
remember, was not ignoble. The raising 
of the type man, the winning of the highest 
culture, is an inspiring aim. Nietzsche 
saw that this would never be under the 
ideals then prevalent of comfort, money- 
getting, Christianity sunk into mere eu- 
dsemonism, elementary education, and the 
rule of the newspapers. He places in con- 
trast the aristocratic ideals of courage and 
distinction. He asks the question, Who is 
to rule? As he points out, "Society seeks 
a commander." 

Once more, in fact, he raises the ques- 



298 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

tion, "What is the nature of Authority?" 
This question is one of increasing im- 
portance. People will be forced to an- 
swer it with more care than they have 
done recently. In all practical affairs, 
the common answer is: "Authority is 
what I like." Nietzsche's answer is that 
in the rare person: "Authority is what I 
command." He moves right away from 
the prevailing notion that every one's 
opinion is equally valuable. Creighton 
used to complain of "the appalling levity " 
with which people pronounced judgments 
on topics they have never studied. This 
evil is real. It is well that we should 
recognise it, while avoiding the opposite 
danger of the tyranny of the expert who 
cannot see the wood for the trees. In any 
case, the question which Nietzsche puts, 
or rather the problem which determined 
the direction of his thoughts, is one of 
capital importance. In the intellectual 
and religious no less than in political and 
artistic realms it will have its influence. 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 299 

Whatever be the true answer, it must 
take into account the imaginative and 
subconscious elements in human nature, 
no less than the logical and articulate. 
The least reasonable of all replies is that 
negation of authority which we call ab- 
solute individualism. Hardly less so is 
that concentration of authority which in 
the State we call despotism, in the Church 
Infallibilism. Mankind has nowhere yet 
achieved success in this matter. Nowhere 
has it arrived at that form of political or 
even ecclesiastical development which shall 
secure a perfect balance, which shall allow 
to each individual his true place as a 
creator, i. e., as an authority -making per- 
son, while, on the other hand, it insures to 
him the discipline from outside in the 
form of group-authority which shall guard 
against his own caprice. Nietzsche hoped 
that he had effected this by his new as- 
ceticism, by his Jesuitry of the new order 
for his race of ruling philosophers. Un- 
luckily, he ended there. For the vast 



300 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

majority of men he leaves no place at all, 
except to obey, to display the herd-virtues, 
while he assigns to them the part of mere 
tools to the higher man. 

No system can endure that does that. 
It rests on a lie. Owing to existing dif- 
ferences, it may last for a time, like slavery. 
Here only would I emphasise this fact. 
Nietzsche's criticism of democracy, as he 
understood it, i. e., as a theory of com- 
fortable Philistines idealising sympathy and 
devoid of the austere virtues, was indeed 
one-sided and violent; but it had this 
merit — it posed the problem of the pres- 
ent age: How is society to be held to- 
gether without rule? What are the true 
grounds of such rule? In other words, 
what is the basis of political and still 
more of intellectual and artistic obliga- 
tion? Despite many volumes and much 
talk, this problem still exists. Nietzsche 
was right in saying, that it could not be 
solved merely by an appeal to logic or by 
giving free hand to the scientific expert. 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 301 

We need not discuss again Nietzsche's 
criticism of rationalist ideals. His im- 
portance in this respect is obvious. In 
an age in which M. Bergson's is a name to 
conjure with, the connection of Nietzsche 
with a genuine movement away from the 
Aufklarung need not further be emphasised. 

Lastly, it remains to ask, what lessons 
we can draw from Nietzsche in the domain 
of Christian apologetics. 

First of all, we must recognise the re- 
crudescence of pagan morality. No longer 
is there any excuse for saying that moral- 
ity can be taken for granted, or that it 
does not matter what a man believes. 
Very early Nietzsche saw that it was 
hopeless to maintain the Christian stand- 
ards apart from the Christian Faith. The 
novels of George Eliot were remarkable 
for one such attempt. Acton thought 
that their distinctive merit was this that, 
while the writer's standpoint was that of 
pure atheism, she yet maintained the 



302 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

Christian ideal of human life. Nietzsche 
observed the same fact, but regarded it 
as a demerit. 

Nietzsche has for ever shattered the 
old claim of the infidel that he waged no 
war against Christian ideals of living, but 
was concerned only to deny the puerilities 
of a supernatural creed. Whereas Gam- 
betta said, "Le clericalisme c'est Tennemi," 
Nietzsche says: "Le moralisme c'est l'en- 
nemi." Nietzsche knew very well how 
vain was the hope of the Tubingen school 
to destroy Christianity by criticism. So 
long as people went on admiring Christ, 
they would find means of remaining Chris- 
tians. A few might give up the creed. 
The majority, however, seeing that creeds 
were integral to the moral ideal, would in- 
sist on keeping both. Nietzsche has proved 
right. People who want to believe are 
no longer disturbed by the presuppositions 
of intellectualism. Nietzsche himself helped 
to break them down. He did more service 
to the faith than he knew. Confident that 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 303 

the Christian Spirit is the truth, many 
are content to wait even in the quagmire 
until criticism and thought have sifted 
the grain from the chaff. 

Secondly, Nietzsche forces us to face one 
great fact — hatred. We have now before 
us the enmity of many men who give up 
the Christian Faith, not because they 
cannot believe it, but because they hate 
Christ. This hostility, though more bitter, 
is less hopeless than the cold contempt of 
the superior person. Nietzsche is a nobler 
foe, and his blows are direct, not like those 
of certain nominal Christians who under 
the dominion of ideas essentially natural- 
istic would have us surrender all that 
makes Christianity attractive. Christian 
morality is on its trial. More and more 
will it be openly attacked by those who 
worship "the lust of the flesh, the lust of 
the eyes, and the pride of life." Should 
these elements attain predominance as an 
ideal, a new outbreak of persecution is 
certain, and it will be as much more fiendish 



304 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

than the old as the present war is more 
barbarous than those of the eighteenth 
century. Anything like tolerance is ab- 
sent from these people. When his friend 
Romundt thought of becoming a priest, 
Nietzsche took it as a personal insult, the 
end of all friendship. Nietzsche himself 
deprecated persecution. Were his disciples, 
who have none of his charm, to get hold of 
the tiller, nothing can be more certain than 
that they would persecute. Nietzsche's 
philosophy is a repetition of the old com- 
plaint that Christians are hostes humani 
generis. Any general belief in it would 
produce the old cry, Christiani ad leones. 
His dislike of Christianity is indeed to 
many people his chief recommendation. 

In another respect, Nietzsche is fruitful. 
Many amiable persons, some of them 
erudite, seem to discuss the problem of 
Christianity as though it were merely an 
intellectual amusement. 1 To others, again, 

1 Leben, II, 133: "Bis heute ist mir nichts fremder und unver- 
wandter als die ganze europ'aische und amerikanische Spezies 
von 'libres penseurs' . . . sie glauben allesammt noch ans 
Ideal — 'Ich bin der erste Immoralist.' " 






THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 305 

the whole matter seems capable of solu- 
tion on grounds of historical criticism, in 
which are inherent presuppositions which 
they accept without inquiry. Before people 
begin to discuss the historical problem, they 
must have answered the old question, 
What is the chief end of Man? Much 
even of ultra-modernist or liberal writing 
seems to take for granted the Christian 
ideal, and merely to ask how to commend 
it. The real question is: "What think 
ye of Christ?" Is the Christian ideal 
decadent or is it noble? Is it true, as St. 
Paul said in one of Creighton's favourite 
texts to ordinands, "that the weakness of 
God is stronger than men," or is Nietzsche's 
apotheosis of force the only truth ? Many 
books are written now which ignore the 
fact that there can be any doubt about 
ethical ideals. The writer is occupied with 
the question as to which bit of the Creed 
he can throw as a sop to Cerberus, hoping 
thus to win the educated man. Nietzsche 
is a standing witness that, even if you 



306 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

throw over the whole Creed, you are no 
nearer to your end; you will have made 
ridiculous what was always hateful. That 
is all. L'homme moyen sensuel is not and 
never will be Christian in his aims; now 
that he is educated and free he will say 
so. The very last thing that will attract 
is a Christianity with the supernatural 
left out, and all the old moral ideals intact. 
Such a man needs a change of heart be- 
fore he wants Christ. When he does, 
except for one or two details, he will not 
be troubled by the Creed. "Except ye 
repent, and become as little children, ye 
cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven." 
Nietzsche's call to reality is a lesson to 
all Christians. He saw that many men 
disguise their egotism under the mask of 
a high moral ideal; that even sympathy 
may be a cloak of self-indulgence and the 
love of power, and that pity in some matters 
is but the expression of cowardice. He 
summoned men to go out into the wilder- 
ness away from all hothouses, and predicted 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 307 

treasures for all who treat life as a great 
adventure. Christians profess to do that. 
Via Cruets via lucis is their motto. In 
face of Nietzsche's attacks and those of 
others, a Christianity which is what Mr. 
Wells called "muffled" will have no ap- 
peal. Are there not many who act as 
though St. Paul had said that the love of 
money was a root of all good, instead of 
evil? Few Christians attain so high a 
standard as did Nietzsche. 

Christians, again, in contradistinction 
to Nietzsche assert the will to freedom. 
They believe that we are all "members 
one of another." Yet do all of them live, 
or even try to live, as though they be- 
lieved this? Christians may agree with 
Nietzsche in the doctrine of differences be- 
tween men conditioned by natural gifts and 
inheritance. They are bound to differ 
from him when he bids them to treat 
large classes of men as mere things, the 
conditions of the higher life for themselves. 
But do they not sometimes live as though 



308 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

that were the truth? No baser cynicism, 
as William Morris once said, can exist 
than that of the man of culture content 
to enjoy all the treasures of humanity 
without contributing anything. Yet with- 
out precisely intending it, many devout 
Christians are little better. They look upon 
the great mass of men as of a different 
order, and at every attempt to better 
their condition they set up a panic outcry 
that their dividends are in danger. That 
cry will nowadays unite many who differ 
in every other belief. Nietzsche is signif- 
icant, not because he does not, but because 
he does, express the spirit of his time. 
All he did was to make it more articulate 
and to accept without glozing the fact, 
all too patent, of the servitude of the many 
for the comfort of the few. The tempta- 
tion — expressed in the extreme in the 
culte du moi — to treat the whole crowd 
as mere instruments of my pleasure is 
a temptation as old as human nature. 
It is better indeed, for the most part, 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 309 

that, even if men do these things, they 
should acknowledge a higher standard. 
Nietzsche has at least the merit of honesty. 
The more his writings are read, the more 
difficult will it be for Christians to go on 
trying to serve both God and Mammon. 
They cannot go on for ever halting be- 
tween two opinions, directing their lives 
by one standard and professing lip service 
to another. They will have to come out 
and no longer be of those Limbo-spirits, 
"neither for God nor for his enemies." 

Nietzsche is one of the many influences 
that will deepen the cleavage between 
the Church and the world in the future. 
All compromises will be less and less to 
the taste of the succeeding age. Much of 
Nietzsche is, indeed, of direct service to 
the Christian, and is far less antagonistic 
than he supposed. Even, however, with 
these reservations, there is a gulf fixed. 

Nietzsche is a portent, as he said. His 
attitude of neo-pagan revolt against Chris- 



310 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

tian and humane values is a symptom. 
Nietzsche claimed to be reviving the heroic 
prephilosophic spirit of Greece and Rome. 
The use to which he put classical culture is 
not new. We see it in some of the Renais- 
sance princes or in our own Tiptoft. 

Classical antiquity had many aspects. 
One such can be seen in that movement 
which steered by Plato's star. This move- 
ment developed ethical doctrines which 
resembled the Christian, and a sense of 
religious need which was fulfilled only in 
the Catholic Church. Friends and foes 
alike now recognise the greatness of this 
proeparatio evangelica, not only in strictly 
philosophical thought, but also in ethics. 
Nietzsche was well aware of it, but he hated 
it, and Socrates to him spelled decadence. 
In later ages classical studies have often 
formed a propaedeutic to Christian theol- 
ogy. Works like Fenelon's Telemaque, and 
indeed all the most characteristic literature 
of the seventeenth century shew the blend- 
ing of the two streams of classical tradition 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 311 

and Christian feeling. One eminent critic 
holds that the special note of the French 
genius is this blending~of the two antiqui- 
ties, and for that reason he sets Bossuet at 
its summit. Until recently this has been 
the spirit of classical culture in England. 

Nietzsche also drew his inspiration from 
the classics, but it was an inspiration to- 
tally contrary. He went back to the pa- 
gan prephilosophic side of Hellenism, to 
Rome conquering and proud, not humane, 
as in Cicero. To him the Greek spirit was 
essentially this-worldly, outward, and bar- 
baric. In Christianity he found the most 
dangerous enemy, for it had sucked the 
sap from the ancient tree and supplanted 
this grand, aristocratic immoralism. 

There can be little doubt that Nietzsche 
was right in his facts. True Paganism is 
seen in the spirit of the Melian dialogue or 
of the Roman slave system, not in the re- 
fined ethics of Cicero or the meditative 
melancholy of Marcus Aurelius. This real 
Paganism is the sworn foe of Christianity 



312 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

and of all ideals which believe in human 
brotherhood. Nietzsche drank deeply of 
this spirit and helped to make it operative. 
Many traces of this baleful side in classical 
culture may be seen to-day. We must face 
it. Christians have to meet an attack 
which owes its origin not to scientific in- 
quiry or philosophic scepticism, but to the 
glamour of Athens and to the grandeur of 
Rome. 

If in this respect Nietzsche is a foe, in 
another he is a friend. Nietzsche knew the 
tragedy of things. He never thought that 
evil was only an appearance, nor was suf- 
fering to him merely the creases in the 
eternal smile of the Absolute. No facile 
optimism, whether of Hegel or of Rousseau, 
no blind faith in the idol of automatic 
progress, no romantic idealisation of nine- 
teenth-century enlightenment marred the 
clearness of his vision. He knew that life 
is tragic, and that man needs redemption. 
He knew, too, that the cost of any redemp- 
tion that is worth having must be terrific. 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 313 

The price for the world's ransom must be 
paid in blood. The world would not be 
worth redeeming could it be paid in any 
lower coinage. In this sense Nietzsche is 
at one with all that is best in Christianity, 
although he was opposed to much that 
masqueraded under that august title. 
Modern civilisation is the apotheosis of 
vulgarity — or was. In its gaudy and clam- 
orous prosperity, with every shop-window 
shouting, men have mistaken all their 
values and mixed the colours of the world. 
In religion an idol has been made of easy 
amiability, and for the enthralling specta- 
cle of God as Father men have substituted 
a pretty picture of the eternal grandmother. 
The "splendour of God" had become a 
tawdry oleograph, and a milk-and-water 
sentimentalism had usurped the once aus- 
tere name of Christian piety. The reac- 
tion against Puritanism had led to a reli- 
gion of weak good nature and the refusal 
of all austerity. It was against this that 
Nietzsche tilted when he attacked Strauss 



314 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

and denounced the shallowness of free- 
thinking optimists. He was right. This, 
at least, we in our generation may learn. 
We learn it at the cost either of our own 
service or the loss of many friends — of 
whom we only dare hope that we may be 
not all unworthy. The world is once more 
revealed to us as a place "of true, marvel- 
lous, inextricable courage and power, a 
question-chamber of torture by rack and 
fire, with no sleep among the demon ques- 
tioners, none among the angel watchers, 
none among the men who stand or fall be- 
side these hosts of God." This does not 
make faith easy. It makes it strong. 
Deafened by the thunder of the guns and 
dazed by the spectacle of a world in ruins, 
many a man and woman have lost all faith 
in a God who is Love. Those who keep 
their faith keep it with a difference. No 
more will they cavil at the Master's like- 
ness of His Father to an austere landowner. 
No more will they find it hard to believe 
that Love, because it is perfect, will send 



THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 315 

not peace but a sword. Love is known 
for what it is, no sentimental wish for 
another's pleasure, which will be changed 
by a show of tears, but a resolute will for 
his true good — ready to purchase that good 
at any cost in pain, not only to himself but 
also to the loved one. "There is nothing 
so merciless as the mercy of God." Not all 
men will have religion now or at any time. 
But one great quality will come back to 
all religion that is real — the awe of God. 
Men have dreamed that they could love 
God yet cease altogether to fear Him. 
They have found that to love God without 
a holy fear is not possible. In the long 
run Love goes, [too, and self reigns alone. 
Nietzsche felt this in a dim way. He got 
out of the difficulty by denying God alto- 
gether. But he kept the sense of the tragic 
and tremendous greatness of life. This, he 
said, we are to recognise, to embrace, and 
even to adore — if we would rise to the 
height of freedom. Courage and a face 
always smiling, with pain not merely braved 



316 THE WILL TO FREEDOM 

but transmuted, joy amid a universe which 
is a chamber of horrors, and life best felt 
as life with death lurking at every footfall, 
these were the maxims which he preached. 
All honour to him that he preached them 
with no hope of any reward, no gleam from 
any light behind the hill. We shall do well 
if we take from this bitter tonic its good- 
ness, the sense of the greatness of things, 
the need of courage and a free soul, the 
worth of discipline, the futility of mere 
comfort-worship, and the vanity of all 
security that has any other anchor than 
our own soul. We Christians are the hap- 
pier that we can see a reason for all this 
where Nietzsche saw none, and can say 
with the ancient sage: ^The fear of the 
Lord is the beginning of wisdom; and to 
depart from evil, that is understanding." 



INDEX 



Adam Smith, 3. 

Antichrist, 6, 42, 106-110, 176, 

232. 
Apollinian art, 22, 277. 
Asceticism, 306-7; Oriental 

and Christian, 122-4. 
Authority, Nietzsche's view of, 

297-300. 

Basle, 10, 18, 20, 21, 35, 231. 

Bayreuth, 30, 31. 

Benthamism, Nietzche's atti- 
tude to, 72, 112, 197, 285. 

Bergson, 75, 154, 185, 237, 
239, 241. 

Bernard Shaw, 228. 

Beyle (Henri), 19, 53. 

Beyond Good and Evil, 42, 141, 
176, 252, 292. 

Birth of Tragedy, 22, 25, 171, 
174, 175. 

Bismarck, 18, 27, 197. 

Bonn (University of), 15. 

Brahm, Dr., 267. 

Brandes, Georg, 56, 150, 197, 
216. 

Burckhardt, 22. 

Carlyle, 92. 

Cams, Dr. Paul, 201. 

Case of Wagner, The, 42, 43, 176. 

Cesare Borgia, 81, 87, 137, 
149-150, 169, 271. 

Chamberlain, Houston Stew- 
art, 117. 280. 



Christ, Nietzche's estimate of, 

116, 146-7, 303, 305-6. 
Comtism, 2, 129, 211, 235. 
Conscience, origin according 

to Nietzsche, 110-1, 144. 
Critique of the Pure Reason, 

188. 
Culture, 24, 113, 199, 249, 254, 

310; and history, 28, 251; 

and Christianity, 131; 

Nietzsche's contribution to, 

290 ff. 

Darwin, 86, 175, 295; influence 
on Nietzsche, 194-6. 

Davidson, John, 267, 290. 

Dawn of Day, The, 41, 159, 175. 

Democracy, 293-5; Nietzsche 
a reaction from, 296, 300. 

Determinism, 235-8. 

Deussen, Dr. Paul, 13, 15, 41, 
197. 

Dionysian, art, 22; "Affirma- 
tion of Wprld," 69; ideal, 
90, 162, 211, 262, 277, 279. 

"Distinction," 88, 136, 138, 
144, 256; of Christian 
Church, 125-6, 135, 137. 

Ecce Homo, 7, 42, 43, 58, 103-5, 
159-162, 169, 176, 224. 

Einzige und sein Eigenthx. m, 
Der, 174, 200, 206, 207. 

Essays Out of Season, 24, 27, 
93, 171, 175, 254. 



317 



318 



INDEX 



Eternal Recurrence, 19, 62, 
69-70, 93-101; place of in 
Nietzsche's philosophy, 97-8; 
and freedom, 239. 

Fischer, 22. 
Forster-Nietzsche, Frau. See 

Elizabeth Nietzsche. 
Fouillee, 172, 195, 200; on 

Nietzsche's style, 225. 
Foundations of 19th Century, 

117, 280. 
Freedom, 235-8; Nietzsche's 

doctrine of, 238; gospel of, 

288. 
Future of Our Educational 

Institutions, 174, 231. 

Gabriele d'Annunzio, 270. 
Gast, Peter, 11, 32, 36, 150. 
Genealogy of Morals, 42, 176, 

232, 238. 
George Eliot, 301. 
Gobineau, 296. 
Gould, Dr., 17. 

Hartmann, 24, 192, 201. 
Hedonism, 72, 233, 235. 
Hegel, 193, 235, 312. 
Human, AU Too Human, 41, 
175, 194. 

Joyful Wisdom, The, 36, 63, 
175. 

Kant, 141, 184; Nietzsche's 
contempt for, 177; Nietz- 
sche's debt to, 178, 185-9. 

La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche's 

imitation of, 41, 169, 247. 
Leben Jesu, 48. 



Leipzig, 15, 40. 

Lou-Salome, Fraulein, 36, 37, 
63, 94. 

Lower classes, Neitzsche's atti- 
tude towards, 24, 259; re- 
lation to supe'rman, 81 ff.; 
character of, 113. 

Machiavelli, 141, 169, 283. 

Malwida von Meysenburg, 35, 
36, 37. 

Meyer, Dr. Richard, 25, 72. 

Middle classes, 120, 153. 

Mill, J. S., 3. 

Morality, 3, 4; inconsistency 
of Nietzsche's attacks on, 79; 
slave, 83, 113; Nietzsche 
and ascetic, 111; the "idi- 
osyncrasy of the decadent," 
115, 119; of Nietzsche's 
followers, 266 ff.; Christian, 
on trial, 303. 

Napoleon, 81, 87, 127, 149, 
270, 284. 

Naumburg, 12, 13; its influ- 
ence on Nietzsche, 51, 52, 
134. 

Nemesis of Nations, 151. 

Nietzsche, Elizabeth, 11, 12, 
37; marriage, 38; goes to 
Paraguay, 39; returns to 
Nietzsche, 45. 

Nietzsche's father, 11; mother, 
11, 12, 44; grandmother, 11, 
12. 

Old Faith and the New, The, 23, 
24-5. 

Paganism, 4, 23, 28, 85, 289; 
' ' corrupted ' ' by Socrates 



INDEX 



319 



and Plato, 117, 310; con- 
quered by Church, 119; 
of Renaissance, 149, 289; 
Nietzsche's revival of, 301-2, 
311-2. 

Pallares, Dr., 34, 57; on 

Nietzsche's style, 246. 
'Panetb, Dr., 32, 40. 
* Paterson, 151. 

Pessimism, 123, 144. 

Pforta, 13, 15. 

Phillips, L. March, 132. 

Political Theory in the West, 
History of, 293. 

Prussia, 10; and culture, 26, 
47, 196, 198. 

Quintessence of Nietzsche, 266. 

Redemption, Nietzsche and, 
61. 

Ree, Dr. Paul, 36, 37, 52, 
175. 

Richter, Claire, 196. 

Ritschl, 15, 16, 19. 

Rocken, 10. 

Rohde, Erwin, 17, 40. 

Romanticism, Nietzsche's atti- 
tude to, 28, 55, 168, 255; 
and Wagner, 34. 

Romundt, 304. 

Ruling Class, The, 88, 112, 153, 
199; conquered by morality, 
113-5. 

Schmidt, Karl. See Stirner. 

Schopenhauer, 16, 19, 33, 51, 
52, 195; Nietzsche's essay 
on, 29; and Christianity, 
121-4, 130; Nietzsche's debt 
to, 189-194. 

Sils-Maria, 36, 39, 57. 



Slave world, 113-5, 117. See 
lower classes. 

Socialism, 135, 296. 

Stirner, Max, Nietzsche's debt 
to, 174, 200-1, 207-210; 
comparison with Nietzsche, 
202-6; style of, 218. 

Strauss, David, 23, 24, 27, 141, 
143, 313. 

Suffering, value of, 67, 91, 145, 
286. 

Superman, 6, 19, 52, 79 ff., 
145, 168, 176, 195, 276; 
morality of, 82-3, 209, 268, 
284; vagueness of, 86; in- 
dividual or class?, 87, 89; 
restraints of, 138-9. 

Tennyson, Alfred, 4, 290-1. 
Tolstoy, 232. 
Tonnies, Dr., 148. 
Triebschen, 22, 30, 176. 
Turin, 43, 44, 57. 
Twilight of the Idols, 159. 

"Vornehmheit." See Distinc- 
tion. 

Wagner, 16, 19, 55; influence 
on Nietzsche, 22, 30, 171; 
and culture, 26; Nietzsche's 
essay on, 30, 234; goes to 
Bayreuth, 30; quarrel with 
Nietzsche, 31-5; Nietz- 
sche's reaction from, 176. 

Wagner, Frau Cosima, 22, 30, 
34. 

Warrior class, 120, 272-4. 

Weimar, 45. 

Will to Live, 67-9, 75, 109. 

Will to Power, 20, 21, 78 ff., 



320 INDEX 

92-3, 112, 154, 195, 288; Zarathustra, 6, 9, 40, 41, 42, 

of the slave world, 113; 48, 49, 54, 94-5, 153, 158, 

expression in architecture, 163-7 169, 176, 256; popu- 

132. larity of, 214, 257; "Night 

Will to Power, 15, 42, 47, 68, Song," 220-4; "Country of 

73-4, 75-7, 95-7, 176, Culture," 254; "Song of 

180-4, 233, 236, 244-6, 256. Seven Seals," 264; on the 

272-4, 275-9. State, 281-3. 



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